Approximate template matching for natural language queries

ABSTRACT

Systems and methods provide a media guidance application that recognizes a plurality of natural language search queries for identifying a set of search results. For example, a user may want to determine when the Yankees are playing their next baseball game. The user may structure their query in multiple ways, such as, “When are the Yankees playing?” “What time is the Yankees game?” “When is the next Yankees baseball game?” The user would expect the same result, a description of when the Yankees are playing, regardless of how the query is structured. The systems and methods enable a user to use a plurality of search queries when searching for items or information to get desired results.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No.15/187,029, filed Jun. 20, 2016, currently allowed, which is herebyincorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

BACKGROUND

In conventional systems, users have access to a wide variety of mediaand information such as television programs and sports scores. Often, auser may wish to search for information using a hands-free interface,such as using voice control. Conventional systems may allow a user toperform a search using a voice command. However, these systems typicallyonly recognize a fixed number of search queries because input voicesearches are matched directly to the fixed queries themselves.Therefore, a user must structure their voice command in a particularmanner so that it can be recognized by the system. Often, this requiresthat the user speaks in a manner which they do not find natural. In manycases, the user must look up or learn how commands need to be structuredbefore they can use the system. If a voice command is not structuredsuch that it can be recognized by the system, the user may be promptedto repeat the command in a manner recognized by the system and/or may bepresented with no search results.

SUMMARY

Accordingly, methods and systems are described herein for a mediaguidance system that recognizes a plurality of natural language queriesas having a similar intent and provides search results matching theintent. A user may wish to structure a query, such as a query for a gameschedule, using a variety of different language. For example, a user maywant to determine when the Yankees are playing their next baseball game.A user may structure their query as, “When are the Yankees playing?” or“What time is the Yankees game?” “When is the next Yankees baseballgame?” The media guidance application may determine that for each of thethree exemplary queries described above, the user is trying to determinewhen the Yankees are playing their next game.

Accordingly, the media guidance application may query a database for thenext Yankees game and may present to the user results of the query. Forexample, the media guidance application may process words from thesearch query and map the word to a vector space where words havingsimilar meanings are mapped closer together than words that do not havesimilar meanings. For example, the words “cat” and “dog” may be mappedcloser together because the words both typically appear in textdescribing household pets. The media guidance application may retrieve atemplate from the vector space that is in close proximity to the searchquery and may retrieve search results based on the template. Forexample, the media guidance application may identify a templateassociated with locating one's pet in close proximity to the words “cat”and “dog” because the words and the template both relate to householdpets. For example, because the media guidance application matches wordsof a search query to words of a generalized search query template (e.g.,by matching the search query words to words of the template in a vectorspace), the media guidance application is able to match the search querytemplate to variations of the search query template itself without theneed to store the variations of the template in memory. Therefore, theuser is not burdened with remembering and reciting structured queries asin prior art systems.

In some aspects, a media guidance application may receive an input querycomprising at least two words via a user input device. For example, themedia guidance application may receive textual input via a keyboardconnected to the media guidance application. In some embodiments, themedia guidance application may detect an audio signal, such as a voiceinput, at an audio input device, such as a microphone accessible to themedia guidance application. The media guidance application may processthe audio input to create a text string of the words in the audiosignal. For example, the media guidance application may perform aspeech-to-text recognition algorithm on the voice input. The mediaguidance application may determine, for example, after performing thespeech-to-text processing on the input audio, that the input audioincludes two words.

The media guidance application computes a first representation vectorcorresponding to a first word of the input query and a secondrepresentation vector corresponding to a second word of the input query.For example, the media guidance application may use an algorithm, suchas a word-to-vector algorithm in a natural language processing toolkitaccessible to the media guidance application, to generate a vectorrepresentation for each word in the input query. The media guidanceapplication may compute the vector representation for each of the firstand second words such that respective values in the first vectorrepresentation and in the second vector representation correspond todegrees to which the first word and the second word match features of aset of word features. For example, the media guidance application maydetermine, based on the first word, a probability of the first wordco-occurring with other words from a set of words. Each respective valuein the first representation vector may comprise a respective probabilitythat the first word co-occurs with each respective word in the set. Asan example, the media guidance application may receive the input query“Where's Entourage.” The media guidance application may compute a firstrepresentation vector for the word “Where's” and may compute a secondrepresentation vector for the word “Entourage.”

The media guidance application retrieves a search query templaterelating to a search intent from a database. For example, the mediaguidance application may query a remote server for words associated witha search intent, such as an intent to determine where a user can accessmedia. The words may correspond to a search query template matching theintent, such as the search query “Locate media_X?” where the term“media_X” can be replaced by the media guidance application with a wordcorresponding to the media that the user is searching for. For example,the media guidance application may determine that the user is searchingfor the movie “Hunger Games.” In response to determining that the useris searching for the movie “Hunger Games,” the media guidanceapplication may generate a query to a database replacing the term“media_X” in the template with the term “Hunger Games.”

The media guidance application may compute a representation vector, asdescribed above, for each of the words in the search query template. Forexample, the media guidance application may compute a thirdrepresentation vector corresponding to a third word, such as “Locate,”and may compute a fourth representation vector corresponding to a fourthword, such as “media_X.” As described above, values in the third and thefourth representation vectors may represent how closely the third wordand the fourth word match features of a set of word features, such as aprobability of each of the third and fourth word co-occurring with eachword in a set of commonly used words.

The media guidance application computes a first distance between thefirst representation vector and the third representation vector. Themedia guidance application may compute the distance to create a metricfor comparing how similar the first representation vector is to thethird representation vector. For example, the media guidance applicationmay compare each value in the first representation vector with arespective value in the third representation vector to compute thedistance. For example, the media guidance application may compute alarge distance if respective values in the first representation vectorcorresponding to respective values in the third representation vectorare not similar. In contrast, the media guidance application may computea small distance if respective values in the first representation vectorare similar to respective values in the third representation vector(e.g., a difference between values within the first representationvector and corresponding values in the third representation vector arewithin a threshold value). For example, the media guidance applicationmay compare the representation vector corresponding to the word “Locate”with the representation vector corresponding to the word “Where's” andmay determine that the distance is small because both words refer todetermining a place of an item.

The media guidance application computes a second distance between thesecond representation vector and the fourth representation vector inresponse to determining that the first distance is less than a firstthreshold distance. For example, the media guidance application mayretrieve a first threshold from memory to determine whether the firstword is similar to the third word. For example, the media guidanceapplication may determine a first distance between the respectiverepresentation vectors of “Where's” and “Locate” as described above. Themedia guidance application may compare the value of the distance to athreshold to determine whether the words are similar. If the mediaguidance application determines that the words are similar, the mediaguidance application may compute a second distance between the secondrepresentation vector and the fourth representation vector. For example,the media guidance application may compute the second distance, asdescribed above, to quantify how similar the second word, such as“Entourage” is to the fourth word, such as “media_X” because the firstword of the input query matches the first word of the search querytemplate.

The media guidance application selects the search query template inresponse to determining that the second distance is less than a secondthreshold distance. For example, the media guidance application mayretrieve a second threshold from a remote database accessible to themedia guidance application. The media guidance application may comparethe second distance to the second threshold distance to determinewhether the words are similar enough to use the search query template(e.g., if both words in the input query match words of the searchquery). If the second distance is less than the second thresholddistance, the media guidance application may select the search querytemplate to provide search results to the user.

The media guidance application retrieves search results based on thesearch query template. For example, the media guidance application mayuse the search query template to construct a query to a databasecomprising the locations of media. For example, the media guidanceapplication may determine that because the first word of the user'ssearch query matches the first word of the search query template, andbecause the second word of the user's search query matches the secondword of the search query template, that the search query template shouldbe used to retrieve search results.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may include one ofthe two words from the input query in a query to a database. Forexample, the media guidance application may replace a word in the searchquery template with a word from the input query. The media guidanceapplication may generate a search query based on the search querytemplate (e.g., “Locate media_X”) and may replace “media_X” with mediathat the user is trying to locate (e.g., “Entourage”). The mediaguidance application may transmit the query to a search database and maypresent results of the query to the user. For, example, the mediaguidance application may transmit the query “Locate Entourage” over anetwork connection and may output audio over a speaker of the mediaguidance application describing a location of the media (e.g., based onthe results of the query to the database).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may identify a partof speech associated with the first word to determine whether the firstword should be included in the query to the database. For example, themedia guidance application may apply a part-of-speech tagging algorithmto the input query. The media guidance application may tokenize eachword in the input query and may input a list of tokenized words to apart-of-speech tagger (“POS tagger”) to retrieve a part of speechassociated with each word. In an example, the media guidance applicationmay determine that the second word is a subject of the input query. Forexample, the media guidance application may determine that “Entourage”is the subject of the input query. The media guidance application mayreplace the subject of the input query (e.g., “Entourage”) with thesubject of the search query template (e.g., “media_X”) and may transmitthe query to a remote database to retrieve search results.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may ignore stopwords in the input query. For example, the media guidance applicationmay determine that an input query includes more than two words. Themedia guidance application may compare the first word of the input queryto a list of stop words to determine whether the first word matches astop word of the list of stop words. In response to determining that thefirst word matches the stop word, the media guidance application mayselect another word of the input query (e.g., a third word from theinput query) and may compute a fifth representation vector for the thirdword of the input query (e.g., by determining degrees to which the thirdword of the input query matches features of the set of word features).The media guidance application may use the fifth representation vectorinstead of using the first representation vector because the firstrepresentation vector corresponds to a stop word.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute thedistance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector by comparing a first value in the firstrepresentation vector with a corresponding second value in the secondrepresentation vector. For example, the media guidance application maytake the first value in an X dimension of the first representationvector and subtract the first value from a second value in the Xdimension of the third representation vector. The media guidanceapplication may store the difference at a location in memory. The mediaguidance application may iteratively select each element of the firstand the third representation vector, may compute a difference, and mayincrement or decrement the distance variable based on the distance. Themedia guidance application may compare the first value with the secondvalue to determine whether the first value and the second value differby less than a threshold amount (e.g., when the media guidanceapplication computes a difference of zero or when the difference is lessthan a threshold value stored in memory). If the media guidanceapplication determines that the difference is less than the thresholdvalue, the media guidance application may leave a value of the distanceunchanged (or add zero). If the media guidance application determinesthat the first value and the second value differ by greater than thethreshold amount, the media guidance application may compute a degree towhich the values are dissimilar and may increment the distance based onthe degree to which the values are dissimilar. For example, the mediaguidance may increment the distance by five when the difference betweenthe two values is five.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute thefirst distance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector based on an orientation of the firstrepresentation vector with respect to the third representation vector ina vector space. For example, the media guidance application maydetermine a number of elements in the first representation vector (e.g.,N) and the third representation vector (e.g., N). In response todetermining that a number of elements in the first representation vectoris equal to a number of elements in the third representation vector(e.g., both vectors have N elements), the media guidance application mayevaluate the first and the third representation vectors in a vectorspace of dimension N. The media guidance application may compute adistance in the vector space, such as a cosine similarity between thefirst and the third representation vector representing an angle betweenthe vectors. When the angle between the first representation vector andthe third representation vector is small, the media guidance applicationmay determine that the vectors are similar. When the angle between thefirst representation vector and the third representation vector islarge, the media guidance application may determine that the vectors arenot similar.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may determine thatthe first distance (e.g., between the first representation vector andthe third representation vector) is smaller than a third distancebetween the second representation vector and the fourth representationvector when the first word matches a meaning of the third word and doesnot match a meaning of the fourth word. For example, as described above,the media guidance application may compute a cosine distance as thefirst and the third distance. The media guidance application maydetermine that a distance is smallest when two words have similarmeaning and may determine that the distance is greatest when the wordsdo not have similar meaning (e.g., based on the representation vectorscapturing the meaning of the words).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may determine thatthe first distance is greater than the first threshold distance, and mayresultantly retrieve a second template for comparison. For example, thefirst search query template may comprise the search query “Who'sperson_X.” The media guidance application may compute a distance between“Where's” (e.g., the first word) and “Who's” (e.g., a fifth word). Themedia guidance application may determine that “Who's” is not similar to“Where's” based on their respective representation vectors as describedabove.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may retrieve thesecond search query template from a database comprising search querytemplates. For example, the media guidance application may retrieve asecond search query template comprising the search query “Locatemedia_X.” The media guidance application may retrieve the second searchquery template and may compute a respective fifth and sixthrepresentation vectors, as described above, for a first word of thesecond search query template (e.g., “Locate”) and a second word of thesecond search query template (e.g., “media_X”).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute a thirddistance between the first representation vector and the fifthrepresentation vector, as described above, and may compare the thirddistance to the first threshold distance. In response to determiningthat the third distance is less than the first threshold distance, themedia guidance application may compute a fourth distance between thesecond representation vector and the sixth representation vector (e.g.,to determine whether the second word of the input query, “Entourage,”matches a second word of the second search query template, “Media_X”).In response to determining that the fourth distance is less than thesecond threshold, the media guidance application may select the secondsearch query template. Based on the second search query template, themedia guidance application may create a query to a database to retrievesearch results corresponding to an intent of the input query (e.g., toidentify a location of the television show “Entourage”). The mediaguidance application may present the search results to the user by, forexample, generating a display of media listings matching the user intent(e.g., media listings for Entourage).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may generate fordisplay the search results organized based on a layout associated withthe search query template. For example, the media guidance applicationmay retrieve a layout associated with the template (e.g., from adatabase) denoting how the search results should be presented to theuser. For example, the media guidance application may retrieve an inputquery of “Where can I play the movie Zoolander?” The media guidanceapplication may determine that the input query matches an intent tolocate media (e.g., by matching the input query to a search querytemplate as described above) and may generate for display tiles (e.g.,in a mosaic) identifying media content providers having access toZoolander. In contrast, the media guidance application may retrieve aninput query “What are the current MLB standings?” The media guidanceapplication may determine that the input query matches an intent todisplay statistics (e.g., by matching the input query to a search querytemplate). In response to determining that the input query matches anintent to display statistics, the media guidance application maygenerate for display a table comprising MLB statistics.

It should be noted that the systems and/or methods described above maybe applied to, or used in accordance with, other systems, methods,and/or apparatuses in this disclosure.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The above and other objects and advantages of the disclosure will beapparent upon consideration of the following detailed description, takenin conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like referencecharacters refer to like parts throughout, and in which:

FIG. 1 shows an illustrative example of user equipment configured toreceive a query from a user in accordance with some embodiments of thedisclosure;

FIG. 2 shows an illustrative example of word representation vectors in atwo-dimensional vector space in accordance with some embodiments of thedisclosure;

FIG. 3 shows illustrative database entries representing media andlocation search templates in accordance with some embodiments of thedisclosure;

FIG. 4 shows an illustrative example of user equipment displaying searchresults retrieved based on a search query template matching a queryinput by a user in accordance with some embodiments of the disclosure;

FIG. 5 shows an illustrative example of a media guidance display thatmay be presented in accordance with some embodiments of the disclosure;

FIG. 6 shows another illustrative example of a media guidance displaythat may be presented in accordance with some embodiments of thedisclosure;

FIG. 7 is a block diagram of an illustrative user equipment device inaccordance with some embodiments of the disclosure;

FIG. 8 is a block diagram of an illustrative media system in accordancewith some embodiments of the disclosure;

FIG. 9 is a flowchart of illustrative steps for generating searchresults based on an approximate template match in accordance with someembodiments of the disclosure; and

FIG. 10 is a flowchart of illustrative steps for selecting a searchquery template in accordance with some embodiments of this disclosure.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS

Systems and methods are provided herein for providing a media guidancesystem that recognizes a plurality of natural language queries as havinga similar intent and generates search results matching the intent. Forexample, the media guidance application may provide an interface forvoice or text based searching. The media guidance application mayretrieve a plurality of different queries from a user each having thesame intent. For example, due to natural variations in how humans speak,when a user is trying to identify the next time the television show“Game of Thrones” is going to air, the user may say “When is ‘Game ofThrones’ airing again?” or “What time can I catch the next episode of‘Game of Thrones’?” or “Show me times I can watch episode five of ‘Gameof Thrones’”, etc. The media guidance application may recognize each ofthe variations as an intent to identify when a next episode of “Game ofThrones” is airing. For example, the media guidance application mayaccess a template in a database comprising a generalized intent for theuser. For example, the generalized intent may be a request for a mediaschedule. The generalized intent may be associated with a plurality ofwords. Each of the plurality of words a may be associated with a vectorin a multi-dimensional vector space, where words having similar meaningsare mapped in close proximity within the vector space. The mediaguidance application may locate a template matching a search query byidentifying words of a template that are in close proximity to words ofthe search query within the vector space. The media guidance applicationmay generate a search query based on the template and may retrieve avariety of search results based on the generated query. Following fromthe previous example, the media guidance application may generate aquery to a database comprising information about the broadcast schedulefor “Game of Thrones.” The media guidance application may retrievesearch results based on the query and may generate for display theresults. For example, the media guidance application may retrieve aschedule of airtimes for “Game of Thrones” and may generate for displaythe schedule and may highlight the airtime for the next availableepisode, or any other episode requested by the user.

The media guidance application may receive an input query via a userinput device. For example, the media guidance application may connect toa physical or virtual keyboard (e.g., a keyboard generated on a display,where touch inputs on the display are correlated to characters by themedia guidance application). The media guidance application may receivetextual input via the keyboard comprising search queries, such asnatural language search queries, and may match the natural languagesearch queries to search templates to retrieve a set of search results.For example, the media guidance application may retrieve a query of“Show me Derek Jeter's batting statistics.” The media guidanceapplication may analyze the query and may determine that the user isrequesting statistics for the baseball player Derek Jeter. In responseto detecting that the user is requesting statistics for Derek Jeter, themedia guidance application may retrieve statistics for Derek Jeter andmay generate for display the statistics.

The amount of content available to users in any given content deliverysystem can be substantial. Consequently, many users desire a form ofmedia guidance through an interface that allows users to efficientlynavigate content selections and easily identify content that they maydesire. An application that provides such guidance is referred to hereinas an interactive media guidance application or, sometimes, a mediaguidance application or a guidance application.

Interactive media guidance applications may take various forms dependingon the content for which they provide guidance. One typical type ofmedia guidance application is an interactive television program guide.Interactive television program guides (sometimes referred to aselectronic program guides) are well-known guidance applications that,among other things, allow users to navigate among and locate many typesof content or media assets. Interactive media guidance applications maygenerate graphical user interface screens that enable a user to navigateamong, locate and select content. As referred to herein, the terms“media asset” and “content” should be understood to mean anelectronically consumable user asset, such as television programming, aswell as pay-per-view programs, on-demand programs (as in video-on-demand(VOD) systems), Internet content (e.g., streaming content, downloadablecontent, Webcasts, etc.), video clips, audio, content information,pictures, rotating images, documents, playlists, websites, articles,books, electronic books, blogs, chat sessions, social media,applications, games, and/or any other media or multimedia and/orcombination of the same. Guidance applications also allow users tonavigate among and locate content. As referred to herein, the term“multimedia” should be understood to mean content that utilizes at leasttwo different content forms described above, for example, text, audio,images, video, or interactivity content forms. Content may be recorded,played, displayed or accessed by user equipment devices, but can also bepart of a live performance.

The media guidance application and/or any instructions for performingany of the embodiments discussed herein may be encoded on computerreadable media. Computer readable media includes any media capable ofstoring data. The computer readable media may be transitory, including,but not limited to, propagating electrical or electromagnetic signals,or may be non-transitory including, but not limited to, volatile andnon-volatile computer memory or storage devices such as a hard disk,floppy disk, USB drive, DVD, CD, media cards, register memory, processorcaches, Random Access Memory (“RAM”), etc.

With the advent of the Internet, mobile computing, and high-speedwireless networks, users are accessing media on user equipment deviceson which they traditionally did not. As referred to herein, the phrase“user equipment device,” “user equipment,” “user device,” “electronicdevice,” “electronic equipment,” “media equipment device,” or “mediadevice” should be understood to mean any device for accessing thecontent described above, such as a television, a Smart TV, a set-topbox, an integrated receiver decoder (IRD) for handling satellitetelevision, a digital storage device, a digital media receiver (DMR), adigital media adapter (DMA), a streaming media device, a DVD player, aDVD recorder, a connected DVD, a local media server, a BLU-RAY player, aBLU-RAY recorder, a personal computer (PC), a laptop computer, a tabletcomputer, a WebTV box, a personal computer television (PC/TV), a PCmedia server, a PC media center, a hand-held computer, a stationarytelephone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a mobile telephone, aportable video player, a portable music player, a portable gamingmachine, a smart phone, or any other television equipment, computingequipment, or wireless device, and/or combination of the same. In someembodiments, the user equipment device may have a front facing screenand a rear facing screen, multiple front screens, or multiple angledscreens. In some embodiments, the user equipment device may have a frontfacing camera and/or a rear facing camera. On these user equipmentdevices, users may be able to navigate among and locate the same contentavailable through a television. Consequently, media guidance may beavailable on these devices, as well. The guidance provided may be forcontent available only through a television, for content available onlythrough one or more of other types of user equipment devices, or forcontent available both through a television and one or more of the othertypes of user equipment devices. The media guidance applications may beprovided as on-line applications (i.e., provided on a web-site), or asstand-alone applications or clients on user equipment devices. Variousdevices and platforms that may implement media guidance applications aredescribed in more detail below.

One of the functions of the media guidance application is to providemedia guidance data to users. As referred to herein, the phrase “mediaguidance data” or “guidance data” should be understood to mean any datarelated to content or data used in operating the guidance application.For example, the guidance data may include program information, guidanceapplication settings, user preferences, user profile information, medialistings, media-related information (e.g., broadcast times, broadcastchannels, titles, descriptions, ratings information (e.g., parentalcontrol ratings, critic's ratings, etc.), genre or category information,actor information, logo data for broadcasters' or providers' logos,etc.), media format (e.g., standard definition, high definition, 3D,etc.), notification information (e.g., text, images, media clips, etc.),on-demand information, blogs, websites, and any other type of guidancedata that is helpful for a user to navigate among and locate desiredcontent selections.

In some embodiments, control circuitry 704, discussed further inrelation to FIG. 7 below, executes instructions for a media guidanceapplication stored in memory (i.e., storage 708). Specifically, controlcircuitry 704 may be instructed by the media guidance application toperform the functions discussed above and below. For example, the mediaguidance application may provide instructions to control circuitry 704to generate the media guidance displays discussed in relation to FIG. 1,FIG. 4, FIG. 5, and FIG. 6. In some implementations, any actionperformed by control circuitry 704 may be based on instructions receivedfrom the media guidance application.

As referred to herein, the term “in response to” refers to initiated asa result of. For example, a first action being performed in response toa second action may include interstitial steps between the first actionand the second action.

As referred to herein, the term “directly in response to” refers tocaused by. For example, a first action being performed directly inresponse to a second action may not include interstitial steps betweenthe first action and the second action.

FIG. 1 shows an illustrative embodiment of an example of user equipmentconfigured to receive voice search, in accordance with some embodimentsof the disclosure. User equipment 100 is depicted having system query102 and user query 104.

In some aspects, user equipment 100 may comprise control circuitry(e.g., control circuitry 704) that executes a media guidance applicationfor recognizing a plurality of natural language queries having a similarintent and generating search results matching the intent. User equipment100 may have all the same capabilities of user television equipment 802,user computer equipment 804, and wireless user communications device 806discussed further in relation to FIG. 8 below.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application retrieves a searchinput comprising at least two words from an input device. For example,the media guidance application may access a microphone or another soundtransducer capable of converting sound waves to electrical signals toretrieve the search input (e.g., voice search input). The media guidanceapplication may process an electrical signal retrieved from themicrophone or sound transducer and to identify words in the electricalsignal. For example, the media guidance application may be integratedinto a device comprising a microphone (e.g., user equipment 100). Themedia guidance application may retrieve an audio wave signal from themicrophone in response to a user speaking into the microphone. Forexample, the media guidance application may monitor the signal at themicrophone (e.g., by polling a signal from the microphone or detectingan interrupt triggered by a sound input). If the sound at the microphoneis above a threshold value (e.g., a threshold voltage for an analogaudio signal or a threshold value for a digital signal), the mediaguidance application may perform a speech-to-text sequencing on theaudio signal to generate a text string from the audio input.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may performspeech-to-text sequencing on an audio signal to identify words in anaudio signal. For example, the media guidance application may analyzethe audio signal and may match the audio signal to a database listingaudio phonemes (e.g., similar classes of sounds). For example, thedifference between the words “bet” and “bat” may be captured by thephoneme “EH” versus “AE.” In some embodiments, the media guidanceapplication may filter or may transform the audio signal beforeperforming the matching. For example, the media guidance application mayfilter the audio signal at the microphone. For example, the mediaguidance application may apply an analog filter (e.g., an analog filterthat blocks a voltage signal that is not within a frequency of the humanvoice range) or may apply digital filtering (e.g., by applying amathematical equation to a sequence of digital samples).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may match thephonemes to a database of word-phoneme pairs. For example, the mediaguidance application may detect the phonemes “B,” “EH,” and “T” in anaudio signal. The media guidance application may construct a series oftri-phonemes, di-phonemes, quad-phonemes, etc. (i.e., three, two, fourphonemes, etc.) from the audio signal. For example, the media guidanceapplication may construct the tri-phoneme “B-EH-T” based on detectingthe phonemes “B,” “EH,” and “T” in the audio signal. The media guidanceapplication may search a database comprising word-phoneme pairs toidentify a word in the speech signal. For example, the media guidanceapplication may match the tri-phoneme “B-EH-T” to a database entryhaving “B-EH-T” associated with the word “BET.” The media guidanceapplication may determine that the portion of the audio signalcorresponding to the phonemes “B-EH-T” is associated with the word“BET.”

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may process theaudio input to create a text string of the words in the audio signal.For example, the media guidance application may perform a speech-to-textrecognition algorithm on the voice input as described above. The mediaguidance application may identify a plurality of words and may form astring comprising each of the words detected in the audio signal. Forexample, the media guidance application may detect the words “Let's,”“Go,” and “Rovi” in the audio signal. In response to detecting the words“Let's,” “Go,” and “Rovi” the media guidance application may construct astring “Let's go Rovi.”

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may monitor theaudio signal for a sequence of words to initiate a search. For example,the media guidance application may wait until the media guidanceapplication detects the sequence of words “Let's go Rovi” before themedia guidance application begins to perform a search. For example, themedia guidance application may generate for display system query 102 inresponse to detecting the sequence of words “Let's go Rovi.” In someexamples, the media guidance application may retrieve a search queryfrom the user (e.g., user query 104) after retrieving a query toinitialize a search (e.g., “Let's go Rovi”). In some embodiments, themedia guidance application may initialize a search interface (e.g., adisplay comprising system query 102) in response to receiving a query toinitialize the search, such as “Let's go Rovi.”

The media guidance application may compute a first representation vectorcorresponding to a first word of the input query and a secondrepresentation vector corresponding to a second word of the input query.For example, the media guidance application may retrieve a query from auser via an audio interface as described above. The media guidanceapplication may construct a string “Where's Entourage?” based ondetecting words in an audio signal from a microphone of the mediaguidance application. The media guidance application may apply analgorithm to identify a vector representation for each word in thestring. For example, the media guidance application may apply thealgorithm to identify a meaning for each of the words in the string. Forexample, the contraction “Where's” may correspond to “where is” as in“Where's Waldo?”, “where has” as in “Where's John been all week?”, or“Where does” as in “Where's salt come from?” The media guidanceapplication may identify three vectors for the contraction “Where's”each vector corresponding to a meaning of the contraction “Where's.” Inan example, the media guidance application may identify a vectorcorresponding to the word “Where's” based on neighboring words. Forexample, the media guidance application may determine that the word“scale” has a first meaning as in “A scale on a fish.” and a secondmeaning as in “Weigh the book on the scale.” The media guidanceapplication may compute a representation vector for a word phraseincluding “scale” because a meaning of scale is dependent on itssurrounding words.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may analyze a corpusof words to construct a vector space for words in the corpus. Forexample, the media guidance application may retrieve a text corpus suchas a set of search queries from a plurality of users. The media guidanceapplication may identify distributional properties of each of the wordsin the corpus (e.g., corpus of search queries). For example, the mediaguidance application may analyze the corpus of search queries and maydetermine how frequently one word co-occurs with another word in thecorpus. The media guidance application may determine an embedding for aword in the corpus based on the observed distributional prosperities.For example, a vector corresponding to the word “scale” as in “scale ofa fish” may be similar to a vector corresponding to the word “fish”because, for example, the media guidance application may determine thatthe word “scale” frequently co-occurs with the word “fish.”

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may analyze atraining corpus comprising words associated with a user. For example,the media guidance application may retrieve a profile associated withthe user comprising sentences or word fragments used by the user. Forexample, the media guidance application may log emails, text messages,and/or conversations of the user to create a corpus of text spoken,typed, read, etc. by the user. For example, the media guidanceapplication may retrieve a user profile from memory. The media guidanceapplication may determine whether a user profile exists by firstidentifying the user (e.g., login information, a picture of the user, avoice of the user, a hash value uniquely identifying the user or anyother known identifying information of the user), and then by comparingthe user's identity against entries of a user profile database. As aresult of the comparison, the media guidance application may receive apointer to a profile if one is located or may receive a NULL value ifthe profile does not exist. The user profile database may be locatedremote or local to the media guidance application (e.g., on storage 508or on media guidance data source 618 accessed via communications network614 described in relation to FIG. 5 and FIG. 6 below). If a user profileis located, the media guidance application may access database entriespointing to a corpus of text associated with the user. For example, theuser may have a dog named “Entourage.” The media guidance applicationmay analyze the corpus associated with the user and may determine thatthe word “Entourage” frequently appears with other references to theuser's pet (e.g., “Go fetch, Entourage” “Did you feed Entourage?” or“Take Entourage for a walk”). In response to this determination, themedia guidance application may determine that a search query “Where'sEntourage” would correspond to a request to identify a location of theuser's pet, whereas for a second user who does not have a pet namedEntourage, the media guidance application may determine that a query“Where's entourage?” corresponds to the television show “Entourage.”

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may use apreexisting algorithm or set of algorithms to identify a vectorrepresentation for a word. For example, the media guidance applicationmay utilize a neural network, such as a word-to-vector algorithm in anatural language processing toolkit accessible to the media guidanceapplication, such as a Word2Vec neural network, to identify a vectorrepresentation for a word. The media guidance application may correlatea word identified in the search query with a representation based on theWord2Vec neural network. For example, the media guidance application mayretrieve a search query comprising the words “Where's Entourage?” Themedia guidance application may compute a first vector for the word“Where's” and a second vector for the word “Entourage” based on theneural network.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may identify a partof speech associated with the first word to determine whether the firstword should be included in the query to the database. For example, themedia guidance application may apply a part-of-speech tagging algorithmto the input query (e.g., using hidden Markov models). For example, themedia guidance application may break up the search query into words orphrases using an algorithm to tokenize the search query. The mediaguidance application may input a list of the tokenized words to a partof speech tagger (“POS tagger”) to retrieve a part of speech associatedwith each word. In an example, the media guidance application maydetermine that the second word is a subject of the input query. Forexample, the media guidance application may determine that “Entourage”is the subject of the input query.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may ignore stopwords in the input query. For example, the media guidance applicationmay determine that a word of the query is a stop word based on applyingthe POS tagging algorithm as described above. The media guidanceapplication may skip producing a vector representation for a word if themedia guidance application determines that the word is a stop word(e.g., because the word does not add meaning to the search query). Forexample, the media guidance application may compare the first word ofthe input query to a list of stop words to determine whether the firstword matches a stop word of the list of stop words. In response todetermining that the first word matches the stop word, the mediaguidance application may select another word of the input query (e.g., athird word of the input query) and may compute a representation vectorfor the third word of the input query. The media guidance applicationmay use the fifth representation vector instead of wasting processingresources trying to compute a first representation vector for the firstword.

FIG. 2 shows word representation vectors in a two-dimensional vectorspace in accordance with some embodiments of the disclosure. Graph 200is depicted having y dimension 202 and x dimension 214. In someembodiments, y dimension 202 and x dimension 214 represent features ofwords detected by the media guidance application in analyzing a wordcorpus as described above. A value within y dimension 202 or x dimension214 may represent a degree to which a word matches a feature representedby the dimension. For example, if a word matches a feature of xdimension 214 closely, the media guidance application may assign a highvalue on the x dimension of a representation vector corresponding to theword. For example, a feature may be a probability, such as a likelihoodof finding a word in close proximity to word features or phrases. Forexample, the media guidance application may determine that the xdimension corresponds to a probability that a word frequently appearsclose to nouns or appears close to animal names. A value in the xdimension may be computed based on evaluating the corpus and determininga probability that the word appears close to the word feature or phrase.For example, the media guidance application may count a total number oftimes the word appears in the corpus and may determine that theprobability is the number of times the word appears in close proximityto the word feature or phrase with respect to the total number of timesthe word appears in the corpus.

Graph 200 is further depicted having representation vectors 218, 216 and208. In some embodiments, the media guidance application may computerepresentation vectors 218, 216 and 208 based on an embedding for a wordwithin a neural network as described above. The media guidanceapplication may compute a first value in y dimension 202 and a secondvalue in x dimension 214 for a representation vector within a2-dimensional vector space represented by y dimension 202 and xdimension 214. For example, the media guidance application may compute aY value for the representation vector based on how closely the wordmatches the word feature corresponding to y dimension 202 and maycompute an X value based on how closely the word matches the wordfeature corresponding to x dimension 214. In this exemplary figure, onlytwo word features are depicted for simplicity. However, the mediaguidance application may compute representation vectors in any number ofdimensions (e.g., 3 dimensions, 200 dimensions, etc.).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute adifference between values within a dimension. Graph 200 is depictedhaving difference 204, 206, 210 and 212, each difference representing asimilarity between representation vectors 216, 218 and/or 208 in eitherx dimension 214 or y dimension 202. The media guidance application maycompute difference 204 based on a difference in y dimension 202 betweenrepresentation vector 216 and representation vector 218. The mediaguidance application may compute difference 206 based on a difference iny dimension 202 between representation vector 208 and representationvector 218. The media guidance application may compute difference 210based on a difference in x dimension 214 between representation vector218 and representation vector 208. The media guidance application maycompute difference 212 based on a difference in x dimension 214 betweenrepresentation vector 218 and representation vector 216.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may match a searchquery (e.g., user query 104) to a search query template to retrievesearch results. For example, the media guidance application may receivesearch queries “Where's Entourage?,” “Find streaming locations forEntourage,” or “Which channel is Entourage on?” and may match eachsearch query to a template for finding a location where a user canaccess media, such as the television show “Entourage.”

FIG. 3 shows illustrative database entries representing searchtemplates, in accordance with some embodiments of the disclosure.Database 300 is depicted having two entries, entry 316 and entry 318.Entry 316 corresponds to search intent 302, associated with a medialocation search. Entry 316 is further associated with database 304.Database 304 may be used by the media guidance application to perform asearch having search intent 302. For example, the media guidanceapplication may select entry 316 when the media guidance applicationperforms a search to identify where a movie is located. The mediaguidance application may select database 304 for performing the searchbecause database 304 is associated with search intent 302 (e.g., anintent to locate media). Entry 316 is further depicted having a searchquery template 306. The media guidance application may use search querytemplate 306 to structure a query to database 304 when performing asearch having search intent 302. For example, when the media guidanceapplication is performing a search to identify a location of media(e.g., a search matching search intent 302), the media guidanceapplication may search database 304 using a query formatted based onsearch query template 306. For example, when the input query is “Where'sEntourage?” the media guidance application may identify the search queryas a request to locate media locations for “Entourage.” The mediaguidance application may search for the “Entourage” by creating a query“Locate Entourage” and transmitting the query to the database 304 (e.g.,media guidance data database). The media guidance application may matchuser query 104 (e.g., “Where's Entourage”) to entry 316 based onmatching representation vectors associated with user query 104 (e.g.,representation vectors for “Where's” and “Entourage” to representationvectors associated with words of the query template (e.g.,representation vectors 308 and 310). For example, entry 316 is depictedas having associated representation vector 308, corresponding to theword “Locate”, and representation vector 310, corresponding to the word“Media”. The media guidance application may match a representationvector corresponding to the word “Where's” with a representation vectorcorresponding to the word “Locate.” Likewise the media guidanceapplication may match a representation vector corresponding to the word“Entourage” with a representation vector corresponding to the word“media” (e.g., because the respective words have similar meanings andare therefore located in close proximity in the vector space).

The media guidance application may retrieve a search query template(e.g., search query template 306) relating to a search intent from adatabase (e.g., search intent 302). For example, the media guidanceapplication may generate representation vectors for words of a usersearch query and may match the representation vectors of the words ofthe search query with representation vectors stored in the database(e.g., database 300). For example, the media guidance application maycompute a first representation vector corresponding to a first word ofthe search query (e.g., “Where's”) and may compute a thirdrepresentation for a second word of the search query (e.g.,“Entourage”). The media guidance application may compute a thirdrepresentation vector corresponding for a third word corresponding to adatabase entry (e.g., entry 316 corresponding to media location searchintent). For example, the media guidance application may compute a thirdrepresentation vector for the word “Locate” corresponding to entry 316.The media guidance application may compute a fourth representationvector corresponding to a fourth word, such as “media” associated withentry 316. As described above, values in the third and the fourthrepresentation vectors may represent how closely the third word and thefourth word match features of a set of word features (e.g., a featurecorresponding to x dimension 214 and corresponding to y dimension 202).

The media guidance application may determine whether a firstrepresentation vector matches a second representation vector bycomputing a distance between the two vectors. For example, the mediaguidance application may compute a first distance between the firstrepresentation vector (e.g., a representation vector for the word“Where's”) and the third representation vector (e.g., a representationvector for the word “locate”). The media guidance application maycompute the distance to create a metric for comparing how similar thefirst representation vector is to the third representation vector (e.g.,to determine how closely the term “Where's” matches a use of the word“location.” The media guidance application may compute an overalldistance between each representation vector based on a similarity ofeach respective vector values in each dimension. For example, the mediaguidance application may compute a distance between two representationvectors in x dimension 214 and may compute a distance between tworepresentation vectors in y dimension 202. An overall distance betweenthe two vectors may be computed based on a sum of the distance in the xdimension and the y dimension. For example, the media guidanceapplication may compute a difference in x dimension 214 betweenrepresentation vector 216 and representation vector 218 by retrieving avalue in the x dimension corresponding to each of representation vector216 and 218 and subtracting the values. The media guidance applicationmay compute a distance graphically represented by difference 212. In anexample, the media guidance application may compare the representationvector corresponding to the word “Locate” with the representation vectorcorresponding to the word “Where's” and may determine that the distanceis small because both words can be associated with a identifying a placeof an item and are therefore have vectors in close proximity in thevector space.

The media guidance application may compute a second distance between thesecond representation vector and the fourth representation vector inresponse to determining that the first distance is less than a firstthreshold distance. For example, the media guidance application mayretrieve a first threshold from memory to determine whether the firstword is similar to the third word. For example, the media guidanceapplication may determine a first distance between the respectiverepresentation vectors of “Where's” and “Locate” as described above. Themedia guidance application may compare the value of the distance to athreshold to determine whether the words are similar. If the mediaguidance application determines that the words are similar, the mediaguidance application may compute a second distance between the secondrepresentation vector and the fourth representation vector (e.g., adistance in y dimension 202). For example, the media guidanceapplication may compute the second distance, similarly to above, toquantify how similar the second word, such as “Entourage” is to thefourth word, such as “media.”

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute thedistance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector by computing distances between correspondingvalues for each dimension of a representation vector. For example, themedia guidance application may take the first value from the firstrepresentation vector (e.g., a value in dimension N) and subtract thefirst value from a second value from the third representation vectoralso from dimension N. The media guidance application may store thedifference at a location in memory. The media guidance application mayiteratively select each element of the first and the thirdrepresentation vector, may compute a difference, and may increment ordecrement the distance variable based on the difference. For example,for each dimension, the media guidance application may increment thedistance variable by a difference computed between the values in the Ndimension of the first and the second representation vector.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compare thefirst value with the second value to determine whether the first valueis within a threshold value of the second value (e.g., when the mediaguidance application computes a difference of zero). For example, themedia guidance application may determine that a distance between thefirst value and the second value is 5. When the media guidanceapplication determines that the distance is small (e.g., less than thethreshold value retrieved from memory), the media guidance applicationmay not increment the distance. For example, when the media guidanceapplication determines that the difference is zero (e.g., less than athreshold value of 1), the media guidance application may leave a valueof the distance unchanged (e.g., add zero). If the media guidanceapplication determines that the first value is not within the thresholddistance of the second value, the media guidance application may computea degree to which the values are dissimilar and may increment thedistance based on the degree to which the values are dissimilar. Forexample, the media guidance application may compute distance based on atiered scale of the difference. For example, the media guidanceapplication may increment the distance by zero when the difference isbetween zero and one. The media guidance application may increment thedistance by five when the difference is between one and two (e.g., tominimize an effect on the distance for vectors that are similar in adimension but amplify an effect on the distance when the vectors aredissimilar in the dimension).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute thefirst distance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector based on an orientation of the firstrepresentation vector with respect to the third representation vector ina vector space. For example, the media guidance application maydetermine a number of elements in the first representation vector (e.g.,N) and the third representation vector (e.g., N). In response todetermining that a number of elements in the first representation vectoris equal to a number of elements in the third representation vector(e.g., both vectors have N elements), the media guidance application mayevaluate the first and the third representation vectors in a vectorspace of dimension N. The media guidance application may compute adistance in the vector space, such as a cosine similarity between thefirst and the third representation vector, where an angle between thevectors represents the distance. When the angle between the firstrepresentation vector and the third representation vector is small, themedia guidance application may determine that the vectors are similar.When the angle between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector is large, the media guidance application maydetermine that the vectors are not similar.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may determine thatthe second distance (e.g., between the second representation vector andthe fourth representation vector) is smaller than a third distancebetween the second representation vector and a fifth representationvector (e.g., a representation vector corresponding to a word of asecond template) when the second word matches a meaning of the fourthword and does not match a meaning of the fifth word. For example, asdescribed above, the media guidance application may compute the seconddistance between the second representation vector (e.g., representationvector for the word “Entourage”) and the fourth representation vector(e.g., representation vector for the word “media”). In an example, themedia guidance application may compute a distance between a fifthrepresentation vector, such as representation vector 314 correspondingto the word POI. The media guidance application may determine that adistance is smallest when two words have similar meaning (e.g.,“Entourage” and “media” may have similar representation vectors because“Entourage” and “media” likely co-occurred in similar contexts in thetraining corpus) and may determine that the distance is greatest whenthe words do not have similar meaning (e.g., “Entourage” and “POI” mayhave dissimilar representation vectors because “Entourage” and “POP”likely do not appear in similar context in the corpus.

The media guidance application may select the search query template inresponse to determining that the second distance is less than a secondthreshold distance. For example, the media guidance application mayretrieve a second threshold from a remote database accessible to themedia guidance application. The media guidance application may comparethe second distance to the second threshold distance to determinewhether the words are similar enough to use the search query template(e.g., if both words in the input query match words of the searchquery). If the second distance is less than the second thresholddistance, the media guidance application may select the search querytemplate to provide search results to the user.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may determine thatthe first distance is greater than the first threshold distance, and mayresultantly retrieve a second template for comparison. For example, thefirst search query template may comprise the search query “Who'sperson.” The media guidance application may compute a distance between“Where's” (e.g., the first word) and “Who's” (e.g., a fifth word). Themedia guidance application may determine that “Who's” is not similar to“Where's” based on their respective representation vectors as describedabove.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may retrieve thesecond search query template from a database comprising search querytemplates. For example, the media guidance application may retrieve asecond search query template comprising the search query “Locate media.”The media guidance application may retrieve the second search querytemplate and may compute a respective fifth and sixth representationvector, as described above, for a first word of the second search querytemplate (e.g., “Locate”) and a second word of the search query template(e.g., “media”).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute a thirddistance between the first representation vector and the fifthrepresentation vector, as described above, and may compare the fifthdistance to the first threshold distance. In response to determiningthat the third distance is less than the first threshold distance, themedia guidance application may compute a fourth distance between thesecond representation vector and the sixth representation vector (e.g.,to determine whether the second word of the input query, “Entourage,”matches a second word of the second search query template, “media”). Inresponse to determining that the fourth distance is less than the secondthreshold, the media guidance application may select the second searchquery template.

The media guidance application may retrieve search results based on thesearch query template. For example, the media guidance application mayuse the search query template to construct a query to a databasecomprising the locations of media. For example, the media guidanceapplication may determine that because the first word of the user'ssearch query matches the first word of the search query template, andbecause the second word of the user's search query matches the secondword of the search query template, that the search query template shouldbe used to retrieve search results.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may rankcorresponding templates based on the distance. For example, the mediaguidance application may determine that the search query “Where'sEntourage” has an overall distance of five to entry 316 and has anoverall distance of fifteen to entry 318 (e.g., by computing a distancefor each dimension of the vector and summing the distances). The mediaguidance application may rank entry 316 higher with respect to entry 318because the distance five is less than the distance of fifteen. Themedia guidance application may select the search query templatecorresponding to entry 316 rather than entry 318 because of the higherranking of entry 316 with respect to entry 318.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may use the searchquery template to query a database associated with the template. Forexample, the media guidance application may use the template and mayinclude one of the two words from the input query to form a query to adatabase (e.g., database 304 used to retrieve search results when tryingto identify a media location). For example, the media guidanceapplication may replace a word in the search query template with a wordfrom the input query. The media guidance application may generate asearch query based on the search query template (e.g., “Locate media”)and may replace “media” with a word from the user search query mostclosely matching the word “media” (e.g., the word from the user searchquery having the smallest distance to media). The media guidanceapplication may transmit the query to a search database (e.g., database304) identified in the database entry and may present results of thequery to the user. For, example, the media guidance application maytransmit the query “Locate Entourage” over a network connection. In someembodiments, the media guidance application may retrieve search resultsbased on the query and may present the search results to the user. Forexample, the media guidance application may output audio over a speakerof the media guidance application describing a location of the media(e.g., based on the results of the query to the database).

FIG. 4 shows an illustrative example of user equipment displaying searchresults retrieved based on a search query template matching a queryinput by a user in accordance with some embodiments of the disclosure.User equipment 400 is depicted having search result 404 and searchresult 406 corresponding to the search indent 402. User equipment 400 isalso depicted having option 408 and option 410 which, when selected,cause the media guidance application to retrieve more search resultsbased on the intent or retrieve search results based on a differentintent. For example, the media guidance application may optionallygenerate for display intent 402 corresponding to an intent predicted bythe media guidance application based on matching words of the searchquery to words of a search query template. The media guidanceapplication may optionally generate for display search result 404corresponding to an on-demand offering for the show “Entourage” inresponse to receiving information from the database indicating theavailability of an on-demand version of “Entourage.” The media guidanceapplication may optionally generate for display search result 406corresponding to a broadcast version of the show “Entourage” in responseto receiving scheduling information about the television show“Entourage.” The media guidance application may optionally generate fordisplay option 408 when additional search results corresponding to thetelevision show “Entourage” are available. The media guidanceapplication may optionally generate for display option 410 in responseto determining that the user search query matches a second templatewithin a threshold amount. For example, the media guidance applicationmay determine that, for the user with the pet named “Entourage,” thequery “Where's Entourage” matches both the intent to search for mediaand an intent to locate the pet. The media guidance application maytherefore generate an option for the user to perform a search using adifferent intent (e.g., via option 410).

In some embodiments, the media guidance application may generate fordisplay the search results organized based on a layout associated withthe search query template (e.g., on user equipment 400). For example,the media guidance application may retrieve a layout associated with thetemplate (e.g., from entry 316), denoting how the search results shouldbe presented to the user. For example, the media guidance applicationmay retrieve an input query of “Where can I watch Entourage?” The mediaguidance application may determine that the input query matches anintent to locate media (e.g., by matching the input query to a searchquery template as described above) and may generate for display tilescomprising information about identified media (e.g., search result 404or 406). In contrast, the media guidance application may retrieve aninput query “What are the current MLB standings?” The media guidanceapplication may determine that the input query matches an intent todisplay statistics (e.g., by matching the input query to wordsassociated with search query template for sports statistics). Inresponse to determining that the input query matches an intent todisplay statistics, the media guidance application may generate fordisplay a table comprising sports statistics, an image of the player,information about media associated with the MLB.

Although the examples herewith have been described in relation to twodimensions with two words, user search queries, templates, etc. may beassociated with any number of words. Representation vectors of theplurality of words associated with a template may be associated with anynumber of dimensions based on a neural network embedding of the word.

FIGS. 5-6 show illustrative display screens that may be used to providemedia guidance data. The display screens shown in FIGS. 5-6 may beimplemented on any suitable user equipment device or platform. While thedisplays of FIGS. 5-6 are illustrated as full screen displays, they mayalso be fully or partially overlaid over content being displayed. A usermay indicate a desire to access content information by selecting aselectable option provided in a display screen (e.g., a menu option, alistings option, an icon, a hyperlink, etc.) or pressing a dedicatedbutton (e.g., a GUIDE button) on a remote control or other user inputinterface or device. In response to the user's indication, the mediaguidance application may provide a display screen with media guidancedata organized in one of several ways, such as by time and channel in agrid, by time, by channel, by source, by content type, by category(e.g., movies, sports, news, children, or other categories ofprogramming), or other predefined, user-defined, or other organizationcriteria.

FIG. 5 shows illustrative grid of a program listings display 500arranged by time and channel that also enables access to different typesof content in a single display. Display 500 may include grid 502 with:(1) a column of channel/content type identifiers 504, where eachchannel/content type identifier (which is a cell in the column)identifies a different channel or content type available; and (2) a rowof time identifiers 506, where each time identifier (which is a cell inthe row) identifies a time block of programming. Grid 502 also includescells of program listings, such as program listing 508, where eachlisting provides the title of the program provided on the listingsassociated channel and time. With a user input device, a user can selectprogram listings by moving highlight region 510. Information relating tothe program listing selected by highlight region 510 may be provided inprogram information region 512. Region 512 may include, for example, theprogram title, the program description, the time the program is provided(if applicable), the channel the program is on (if applicable), theprogram's rating, and other desired information.

In addition to providing access to linear programming (e.g., contentthat is scheduled to be transmitted to a plurality of user equipmentdevices at a predetermined time and is provided according to aschedule), the media guidance application also provides access tonon-linear programming (e.g., content accessible to a user equipmentdevice at any time and is not provided according to a schedule).Non-linear programming may include content from different contentsources including on-demand content (e.g., VOD), Internet content (e.g.,streaming media, downloadable media, etc.), locally stored content(e.g., content stored on any user equipment device described above orother storage device), or other time-independent content. On-demandcontent may include movies or any other content provided by a particularcontent provider (e.g., HBO On Demand providing “The Sopranos” and “CurbYour Enthusiasm”). HBO ON DEMAND is a service mark owned by Time WarnerCompany L.P. et al. and THE SOPRANOS and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM aretrademarks owned by the Home Box Office, Inc. Internet content mayinclude web events, such as a chat session or Webcast, or contentavailable on-demand as streaming content or downloadable content throughan Internet web site or other Internet access (e.g. FTP).

Grid 502 may provide media guidance data for non-linear programmingincluding on-demand listing 514, recorded content listing 516, andInternet content listing 518. A display combining media guidance datafor content from different types of content sources is sometimesreferred to as a “mixed-media” display. Various permutations of thetypes of media guidance data that may be displayed that are differentthan display 500 may be based on user selection or guidance applicationdefinition (e.g., a display of only recorded and broadcast listings,only on-demand and broadcast listings, etc.). As illustrated, listings514, 516, and 518 are shown as spanning the entire time block displayedin grid 502 to indicate that selection of these listings may provideaccess to a display dedicated to on-demand listings, recorded listings,or Internet listings, respectively. In some embodiments, listings forthese content types may be included directly in grid 502. Additionalmedia guidance data may be displayed in response to the user selectingone of the navigational icons 520. (Pressing an arrow key on a userinput device may affect the display in a similar manner as selectingnavigational icons 520.)

Display 500 may also include video region 522, and options region 526.Video region 522 may allow the user to view and/or preview programs thatare currently available, will be available, or were available to theuser. The content of video region 522 may correspond to, or beindependent from, one of the listings displayed in grid 502. Griddisplays including a video region are sometimes referred to aspicture-in-guide (PIG) displays. PIG displays and their functionalitiesare described in greater detail in Satterfield et al. U.S. Pat. No.6,564,378, issued May 13, 2003 and Yuen et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,239,794,issued May 29, 2001, which are hereby incorporated by reference hereinin their entireties. PIG displays may be included in other mediaguidance application display screens of the embodiments describedherein.

Options region 526 may allow the user to access different types ofcontent, media guidance application displays, and/or media guidanceapplication features. Options region 526 may be part of display 500 (andother display screens described herein), or may be invoked by a user byselecting an on-screen option or pressing a dedicated or assignablebutton on a user input device. The selectable options within optionsregion 526 may concern features related to program listings in grid 502or may include options available from a main menu display. Featuresrelated to program listings may include searching for other air times orways of receiving a program, recording a program, enabling seriesrecording of a program, setting program and/or channel as a favorite,purchasing a program, or other features. Options available from a mainmenu display may include search options, VOD options, parental controloptions, Internet options, cloud-based options, device synchronizationoptions, second screen device options, options to access various typesof media guidance data displays, options to subscribe to a premiumservice, options to edit a user's profile, options to access a browseoverlay, or other options.

The media guidance application may be personalized based on a user'spreferences. A personalized media guidance application allows a user tocustomize displays and features to create a personalized “experience”with the media guidance application. This personalized experience may becreated by allowing a user to input these customizations and/or by themedia guidance application monitoring user activity to determine varioususer preferences. Users may access their personalized guidanceapplication by logging in or otherwise identifying themselves to theguidance application. Customization of the media guidance applicationmay be made in accordance with a user profile. The customizations mayinclude varying presentation schemes (e.g., color scheme of displays,font size of text, etc.), aspects of content listings displayed (e.g.,only HDTV or only 3D programming, user-specified broadcast channelsbased on favorite channel selections, re-ordering the display ofchannels, recommended content, etc.), desired recording features (e.g.,recording or series recordings for particular users, recording quality,etc.), parental control settings, customized presentation of Internetcontent (e.g., presentation of social media content, e-mail,electronically delivered articles, etc.) and other desiredcustomizations.

The media guidance application may allow a user to provide user profileinformation or may automatically compile user profile information. Themedia guidance application may, for example, monitor the content theuser accesses and/or other interactions the user may have with theguidance application. Additionally, the media guidance application mayobtain all or part of other user profiles that are related to aparticular user (e.g., from other web sites on the Internet the useraccesses, such as www.allrovi.com, from other media guidanceapplications the user accesses, from other interactive applications theuser accesses, from another user equipment device of the user, etc.),and/or obtain information about the user from other sources that themedia guidance application may access. As a result, a user can beprovided with a unified guidance application experience across theuser's different user equipment devices. This type of user experience isdescribed in greater detail below in connection with FIG. 8. Additionalpersonalized media guidance application features are described ingreater detail in Ellis et al., U.S. Patent Application Publication No.2005/0251827, filed Jul. 11, 2005, Boyer et al., U.S. Pat. No.7,165,098, issued Jan. 16, 2007, and Ellis et al., U.S. PatentApplication Publication No. 2002/0174430, filed Feb. 21, 2002, which arehereby incorporated by reference herein in their entireties.

Another display arrangement for providing media guidance is shown inFIG. 6. Video mosaic display 600 includes selectable options 602 forcontent information organized based on content type, genre, and/or otherorganization criteria. In display 600, television listings option 604 isselected, thus providing listings 606, 608, 610, and 612 as broadcastprogram listings. In display 600 the listings may provide graphicalimages including cover art, still images from the content, video clippreviews, live video from the content, or other types of content thatindicate to a user the content being described by the media guidancedata in the listing. Each of the graphical listings may also beaccompanied by text to provide further information about the contentassociated with the listing. For example, listing 608 may include morethan one portion, including media portion 614 and text portion 616.Media portion 614 and/or text portion 616 may be selectable to viewcontent in full-screen or to view information related to the contentdisplayed in media portion 614 (e.g., to view listings for the channelthat the video is displayed on).

The listings in display 600 are of different sizes (i.e., listing 606 islarger than listings 608, 610, and 612), but if desired, all thelistings may be the same size. Listings may be of different sizes orgraphically accentuated to indicate degrees of interest to the user orto emphasize certain content, as desired by the content provider orbased on user preferences. Various systems and methods for graphicallyaccentuating content listings are discussed in, for example, Yates, U.S.Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0153885, filed Nov. 12, 2009,which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

Users may access content and the media guidance application (and itsdisplay screens described above and below) from one or more of theiruser equipment devices. FIG. 7 shows a generalized embodiment ofillustrative user equipment device 700. More specific implementations ofuser equipment devices are discussed below in connection with FIG. 8.User equipment device 700 may receive content and data via input/output(hereinafter “I/O”) path 702. I/O path 702 may provide content (e.g.,broadcast programming, on-demand programming, Internet content, contentavailable over a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN),and/or other content) and data to control circuitry 704, which includesprocessing circuitry 706 and storage 708. Control circuitry 704 may beused to send and receive commands, requests, and other suitable datausing I/O path 702. I/O path 702 may connect control circuitry 704 (andspecifically processing circuitry 706) to one or more communicationspaths (described below). I/O functions may be provided by one or more ofthese communications paths, but are shown as a single path in FIG. 7 toavoid overcomplicating the drawing.

Control circuitry 704 may be based on any suitable processing circuitrysuch as processing circuitry 706. As referred to herein, processingcircuitry should be understood to mean circuitry based on one or moremicroprocessors, microcontrollers, digital signal processors,programmable logic devices, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), etc., and may includea multi-core processor (e.g., dual-core, quad-core, hexa-core, or anysuitable number of cores) or supercomputer. In some embodiments,processing circuitry may be distributed across multiple separateprocessors or processing units, for example, multiple of the same typeof processing units (e.g., two Intel Core i7 processors) or multipledifferent processors (e.g., an Intel Core i5 processor and an Intel Corei7 processor).

In client-server based embodiments, control circuitry 704 may includecommunications circuitry suitable for communicating with a guidanceapplication server or other networks or servers. The instructions forcarrying out the above mentioned functionality may be stored on theguidance application server. Communications circuitry may include acable modem, an integrated services digital network (ISDN) modem, adigital subscriber line (DSL) modem, a telephone modem, Ethernet card,or a wireless modem for communications with other equipment, or anyother suitable communications circuitry. Such communications may involvethe Internet or any other suitable communications networks or paths(which is described in more detail in connection with FIG. 8). Inaddition, communications circuitry may include circuitry that enablespeer-to-peer communication of user equipment devices, or communicationof user equipment devices in locations remote from each other (describedin more detail below).

Memory may be an electronic storage device provided as storage 708 thatis part of control circuitry 704. As referred to herein, the phrase“electronic storage device” or “storage device” should be understood tomean any device for storing electronic data, computer software, orfirmware, such as random-access memory, read-only memory, hard drives,optical drives, digital video disc (DVD) recorders, compact disc (CD)recorders, BLU-RAY disc (BD) recorders, BLU-RAY 3D disc recorders,digital video recorders (DVR, sometimes called a personal videorecorder, or PVR), solid state devices, quantum storage devices, gamingconsoles, gaming media, or any other suitable fixed or removable storagedevices, and/or any combination of the same. Storage 708 may be used tostore various types of content described herein as well as mediaguidance data described above. Nonvolatile memory may also be used(e.g., to launch a boot-up routine and other instructions). Cloud-basedstorage, described in relation to FIG. 8, may be used to supplementstorage 708 or instead of storage 708.

Control circuitry 704 may include video generating circuitry and tuningcircuitry, such as one or more analog tuners, one or more MPEG-2decoders or other digital decoding circuitry, high-definition tuners, orany other suitable tuning or video circuits or combinations of suchcircuits. Encoding circuitry (e.g., for converting over-the-air, analog,or digital signals to MPEG signals for storage) may also be provided.Control circuitry 704 may also include scaler circuitry for upconvertingand downconverting content into the preferred output format of the userequipment 700. Control circuitry 704 may also include digital-to-analogconverter circuitry and analog-to-digital converter circuitry forconverting between digital and analog signals. The tuning and encodingcircuitry may be used by the user equipment device to receive and todisplay, to play, or to record content. The tuning and encodingcircuitry may also be used to receive guidance data. The circuitrydescribed herein, including for example, the tuning, video generating,encoding, decoding, encrypting, decrypting, scaler, and analog/digitalcircuitry, may be implemented using software running on one or moregeneral purpose or specialized processors. Multiple tuners may beprovided to handle simultaneous tuning functions (e.g., watch and recordfunctions, picture-in-picture (PIP) functions, multiple-tuner recording,etc.). If storage 708 is provided as a separate device from userequipment 700, the tuning and encoding circuitry (including multipletuners) may be associated with storage 708.

A user may send instructions to control circuitry 704 using user inputinterface 710. User input interface 710 may be any suitable userinterface, such as a remote control, mouse, trackball, keypad, keyboard,touch screen, touchpad, stylus input, joystick, voice recognitioninterface, or other user input interfaces. Display 712 may be providedas a stand-alone device or integrated with other elements of userequipment device 700. For example, display 712 may be a touchscreen ortouch-sensitive display. In such circumstances, user input interface 710may be integrated with or combined with display 712. Display 712 may beone or more of a monitor, a television, a liquid crystal display (LCD)for a mobile device, amorphous silicon display, low temperature polysilicon display, electronic ink display, electrophoretic display, activematrix display, electro-wetting display, electrofluidic display, cathoderay tube display, light-emitting diode display, electroluminescentdisplay, plasma display panel, high-performance addressing display,thin-film transistor display, organic light-emitting diode display,surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED), laser television,carbon nanotubes, quantum dot display, interferometric modulatordisplay, or any other suitable equipment for displaying visual images.In some embodiments, display 712 may be HDTV-capable. In someembodiments, display 712 may be a 3D display, and the interactive mediaguidance application and any suitable content may be displayed in 3D. Avideo card or graphics card may generate the output to the display 712.The video card may offer various functions such as accelerated renderingof 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or theability to connect multiple monitors. The video card may be anyprocessing circuitry described above in relation to control circuitry704. The video card may be integrated with the control circuitry 704.Speakers 714 may be provided as integrated with other elements of userequipment device 700 or may be stand-alone units. The audio component ofvideos and other content displayed on display 712 may be played throughspeakers 714. In some embodiments, the audio may be distributed to areceiver (not shown), which processes and outputs the audio via speakers714.

The guidance application may be implemented using any suitablearchitecture. For example, it may be a stand-alone applicationwholly-implemented on user equipment device 700. In such an approach,instructions of the application are stored locally (e.g., in storage708), and data for use by the application is downloaded on a periodicbasis (e.g., from an out-of-band feed, from an Internet resource, orusing another suitable approach). Control circuitry 704 may retrieveinstructions of the application from storage 708 and process theinstructions to generate any of the displays discussed herein. Based onthe processed instructions, control circuitry 704 may determine whataction to perform when input is received from input interface 710. Forexample, movement of a cursor on a display up/down may be indicated bythe processed instructions when input interface 710 indicates that anup/down button was selected.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application is a client-serverbased application. Data for use by a thick or thin client implemented onuser equipment device 700 is retrieved on-demand by issuing requests toa server remote to the user equipment device 700. In one example of aclient-server based guidance application, control circuitry 704 runs aweb browser that interprets web pages provided by a remote server. Forexample, the remote server may store the instructions for theapplication in a storage device. The remote server may process thestored instructions using circuitry (e.g., control circuitry 704) andgenerate the displays discussed above and below. The client device mayreceive the displays generated by the remote server and may display thecontent of the displays locally on equipment device 700. This way, theprocessing of the instructions is performed remotely by the server whilethe resulting displays are provided locally on equipment device 700.Equipment device 700 may receive inputs from the user via inputinterface 710 and transmit those inputs to the remote server forprocessing and generating the corresponding displays. For example,equipment device 700 may transmit a communication to the remote serverindicating that an up/down button was selected via input interface 710.The remote server may process instructions in accordance with that inputand generate a display of the application corresponding to the input(e.g., a display that moves a cursor up/down). The generated display isthen transmitted to equipment device 700 for presentation to the user.

In some embodiments, the media guidance application is downloaded andinterpreted or otherwise run by an interpreter or virtual machine (runby control circuitry 704). In some embodiments, the guidance applicationmay be encoded in the ETV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF), received bycontrol circuitry 704 as part of a suitable feed, and interpreted by auser agent running on control circuitry 704. For example, the guidanceapplication may be an EBIF application. In some embodiments, theguidance application may be defined by a series of JAVA-based files thatare received and run by a local virtual machine or other suitablemiddleware executed by control circuitry 704. In some of suchembodiments (e.g., those employing MPEG-2 or other digital mediaencoding schemes), the guidance application may be, for example, encodedand transmitted in an MPEG-2 object carousel with the MPEG audio andvideo packets of a program.

User equipment device 700 of FIG. 7 can be implemented in system 800 ofFIG. 8 as user television equipment 802, user computer equipment 804,wireless user communications device 806, or any other type of userequipment suitable for accessing content, such as a non-portable gamingmachine. For simplicity, these devices may be referred to hereincollectively as user equipment or user equipment devices, and may besubstantially similar to user equipment devices described above. Userequipment devices, on which a media guidance application may beimplemented, may function as a standalone device or may be part of anetwork of devices. Various network configurations of devices may beimplemented and are discussed in more detail below.

A user equipment device utilizing at least some of the system featuresdescribed above in connection with FIG. 7 may not be classified solelyas user television equipment 802, user computer equipment 804, or awireless user communications device 806. For example, user televisionequipment 802 may, like some user computer equipment 804, beInternet-enabled allowing for access to Internet content, while usercomputer equipment 804 may, like some television equipment 802, includea tuner allowing for access to television programming. The mediaguidance application may have the same layout on various different typesof user equipment or may be tailored to the display capabilities of theuser equipment. For example, on user computer equipment 804, theguidance application may be provided as a web site accessed by a webbrowser. In another example, the guidance application may be scaled downfor wireless user communications devices 806.

In system 800, there is typically more than one of each type of userequipment device but only one of each is shown in FIG. 8 to avoidovercomplicating the drawing. In addition, each user may utilize morethan one type of user equipment device and also more than one of eachtype of user equipment device.

In some embodiments, a user equipment device (e.g., user televisionequipment 802, user computer equipment 804, wireless user communicationsdevice 806) may be referred to as a “second screen device.” For example,a second screen device may supplement content presented on a first userequipment device. The content presented on the second screen device maybe any suitable content that supplements the content presented on thefirst device. In some embodiments, the second screen device provides aninterface for adjusting settings and display preferences of the firstdevice. In some embodiments, the second screen device is configured forinteracting with other second screen devices or for interacting with asocial network. The second screen device can be located in the same roomas the first device, a different room from the first device but in thesame house or building, or in a different building from the firstdevice.

The user may also set various settings to maintain consistent mediaguidance application settings across in-home devices and remote devices.Settings include those described herein, as well as channel and programfavorites, programming preferences that the guidance applicationutilizes to make programming recommendations, display preferences, andother desirable guidance settings. For example, if a user sets a channelas a favorite on, for example, the web site www.allrovi.com on theirpersonal computer at their office, the same channel would appear as afavorite on the user's in-home devices (e.g., user television equipmentand user computer equipment) as well as the user's mobile devices, ifdesired. Therefore, changes made on one user equipment device can changethe guidance experience on another user equipment device, regardless ofwhether they are the same or a different type of user equipment device.In addition, the changes made may be based on settings input by a user,as well as user activity monitored by the guidance application.

The user equipment devices may be coupled to communications network 814.Namely, user television equipment 802, user computer equipment 804, andwireless user communications device 806 are coupled to communicationsnetwork 814 via communications paths 808, 810, and 812, respectively.Communications network 814 may be one or more networks including theInternet, a mobile phone network, mobile voice or data network (e.g., a4G or LIB network), cable network, public switched telephone network, orother types of communications network or combinations of communicationsnetworks. Paths 808, 810, and 812 may separately or together include oneor more communications paths, such as, a satellite path, a fiber-opticpath, a cable path, a path that supports Internet communications (e.g.,IPTV), free-space connections (e.g., for broadcast or other wirelesssignals), or any other suitable wired or wireless communications path orcombination of such paths. Path 812 is drawn with dotted lines toindicate that in the exemplary embodiment shown in FIG. 8 it is awireless path and paths 808 and 810 are drawn as solid lines to indicatethey are wired paths (although these paths may be wireless paths, ifdesired). Communications with the user equipment devices may be providedby one or more of these communications paths, but are shown as a singlepath in FIG. 8 to avoid overcomplicating the drawing.

Although communications paths are not drawn between user equipmentdevices, these devices may communicate directly with each other viacommunication paths, such as those described above in connection withpaths 808, 810, and 812, as well as other short-range point-to-pointcommunication paths, such as USB cables, IEEE 1394 cables, wirelesspaths (e.g., Bluetooth, infrared, IEEE 802-11x, etc.), or othershort-range communication via wired or wireless paths. BLUETOOTH is acertification mark owned by Bluetooth SIG, INC. The user equipmentdevices may also communicate with each other directly through anindirect path via communications network 814.

System 800 includes content source 816 and media guidance data source818 coupled to communications network 814 via communication paths 820and 822, respectively. Paths 820 and 822 may include any of thecommunication paths described above in connection with paths 808, 810,and 812. Communications with the content source 816 and media guidancedata source 818 may be exchanged over one or more communications paths,but are shown as a single path in FIG. 8 to avoid overcomplicating thedrawing. In addition, there may be more than one of each of contentsource 816 and media guidance data source 818, but only one of each isshown in FIG. 8 to avoid overcomplicating the drawing. (The differenttypes of each of these sources are discussed below.) If desired, contentsource 816 and media guidance data source 818 may be integrated as onesource device. Although communications between sources 816 and 818 withuser equipment 802, 804, and 806 are shown as through communicationsnetwork 814, in some embodiments, sources 816 and 818 may communicatedirectly with user equipment 802, 804, and 806 via communication paths(not shown) such as those described above in connection with paths 808,810, and 812.

Content source 816 may include one or more types of content distributionequipment including a television distribution facility, cable systemheadend, satellite distribution facility, programming sources (e.g.,television broadcasters, such as NBC, ABC, HBO, etc.), intermediatedistribution facilities and/or servers, Internet providers, on-demandmedia servers, and other content providers. NBC is a trademark owned bythe National Broadcasting Company, Inc., ABC is a trademark owned by theAmerican Broadcasting Company, Inc., and HBO is a trademark owned by theHome Box Office, Inc. Content source 816 may be the originator ofcontent (e.g., a television broadcaster, a Webcast provider, etc.) ormay not be the originator of content (e.g., an on-demand contentprovider, an Internet provider of content of broadcast programs fordownloading, etc.). Content source 816 may include cable sources,satellite providers, on-demand providers, Internet providers,over-the-top content providers, or other providers of content. Contentsource 816 may also include a remote media server used to storedifferent types of content (including video content selected by a user),in a location remote from any of the user equipment devices. Systems andmethods for remote storage of content, and providing remotely storedcontent to user equipment are discussed in greater detail in connectionwith Ellis et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,761,892, issued Jul. 20, 2010, whichis hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

Media guidance data source 818 may provide media guidance data, such asthe media guidance data described above. Media guidance data may beprovided to the user equipment devices using any suitable approach. Insome embodiments, the guidance application may be a stand-aloneinteractive television program guide that receives program guide datavia a data feed (e.g., a continuous feed or trickle feed). Programschedule data and other guidance data may be provided to the userequipment on a television channel sideband, using an in-band digitalsignal, using an out-of-band digital signal, or by any other suitabledata transmission technique. Program schedule data and other mediaguidance data may be provided to user equipment on multiple analog ordigital television channels.

In some embodiments, guidance data from media guidance data source 818may be provided to users' equipment using a client-server approach. Forexample, a user equipment device may pull media guidance data from aserver, or a server may push media guidance data to a user equipmentdevice. In some embodiments, a guidance application client residing onthe user's equipment may initiate sessions with source 818 to obtainguidance data when needed, e.g., when the guidance data is out of dateor when the user equipment device receives a request from the user toreceive data. Media guidance may be provided to the user equipment withany suitable frequency (e.g., continuously, daily, a user-specifiedperiod of time, a system-specified period of time, in response to arequest from user equipment, etc.). Media guidance data source 818 mayprovide user equipment 802, 804, and 806 the media guidance applicationitself or software updates for the media guidance application.

In some embodiments, the media guidance data may include viewer data.For example, the viewer data may include current and/or historical useractivity information (e.g., what content the user typically watches,what times of day the user watches content, whether the user interactswith a social network, at what times the user interacts with a socialnetwork to post information, what types of content the user typicallywatches (e.g., pay TV or free TV), mood, brain activity information,etc.). The media guidance data may also include subscription data. Forexample, the subscription data may identify to which sources or servicesa given user subscribes and/or to which sources or services the givenuser has previously subscribed but later terminated access (e.g.,whether the user subscribes to premium channels, whether the user hasadded a premium level of services, whether the user has increasedInternet speed). In some embodiments, the viewer data and/or thesubscription data may identify patterns of a given user for a period ofmore than one year. The media guidance data may include a model (e.g., asurvivor model) used for generating a score that indicates a likelihooda given user will terminate access to a service/source. For example, themedia guidance application may process the viewer data with thesubscription data using the model to generate a value or score thatindicates a likelihood of whether the given user will terminate accessto a particular service or source. In particular, a higher score mayindicate a higher level of confidence that the user will terminateaccess to a particular service or source. Based on the score, the mediaguidance application may generate promotions that entice the user tokeep the particular service or source indicated by the score as one towhich the user will likely terminate access.

Media guidance applications may be, for example, stand-aloneapplications implemented on user equipment devices. For example, themedia guidance application may be implemented as software or a set ofexecutable instructions which may be stored in storage 708, and executedby control circuitry 704 of a user equipment device 700. In someembodiments, media guidance applications may be client-serverapplications where only a client application resides on the userequipment device, and server application resides on a remote server. Forexample, media guidance applications may be implemented partially as aclient application on control circuitry 704 of user equipment device 700and partially on a remote server as a server application (e.g., mediaguidance data source 818) running on control circuitry of the remoteserver. When executed by control circuitry of the remote server (such asmedia guidance data source 818), the media guidance application mayinstruct the control circuitry to generate the guidance applicationdisplays and transmit the generated displays to the user equipmentdevices. The server application may instruct the control circuitry ofthe media guidance data source 818 to transmit data for storage on theuser equipment. The client application may instruct control circuitry ofthe receiving user equipment to generate the guidance applicationdisplays.

Content and/or media guidance data delivered to user equipment 802, 804,and 806 may be over-the-top (OTT) content. OTT content delivery allowsInternet-enabled user devices, including any user equipment devicedescribed above, to receive content that is transferred over theInternet, including any content described above, in addition to contentreceived over cable or satellite connections. OTT content is deliveredvia an Internet connection provided by an Internet service provider(ISP), but a third party distributes the content. The ISP may not beresponsible for the viewing abilities, copyrights, or redistribution ofthe content, and may only transfer IP packets provided by the OTTcontent provider. Examples of OTT content providers include YOUTUBE,NETFLIX, and HULU, which provide audio and video via IP packets. Youtubeis a trademark owned by Google Inc., Netflix is a trademark owned byNetflix Inc., and Hulu is a trademark owned by Hulu, LLC. OTT contentproviders may additionally or alternatively provide media guidance datadescribed above. In addition to content and/or media guidance data,providers of OTT content can distribute media guidance applications(e.g., web-based applications or cloud-based applications), or thecontent can be displayed by media guidance applications stored on theuser equipment device.

Media guidance system 800 is intended to illustrate a number ofapproaches, or network configurations, by which user equipment devicesand sources of content and guidance data may communicate with each otherfor the purpose of accessing content and providing media guidance. Theembodiments described herein may be applied in any one or a subset ofthese approaches, or in a system employing other approaches fordelivering content and providing media guidance. The following fourapproaches provide specific illustrations of the generalized example ofFIG. 8.

In one approach, user equipment devices may communicate with each otherwithin a home network. User equipment devices can communicate with eachother directly via short-range point-to-point communication schemesdescribed above, via indirect paths through a hub or other similardevice provided on a home network, or via communications network 814.Each of the multiple individuals in a single home may operate differentuser equipment devices on the home network. As a result, it may bedesirable for various media guidance information or settings to becommunicated between the different user equipment devices. For example,it may be desirable for users to maintain consistent media guidanceapplication settings on different user equipment devices within a homenetwork, as described in greater detail in Ellis et al., U.S. PatentPublication No. 2005/0251827, filed Jul. 11, 2005. Different types ofuser equipment devices in a home network may also communicate with eachother to transmit content. For example, a user may transmit content fromuser computer equipment to a portable video player or portable musicplayer.

In a second approach, users may have multiple types of user equipment bywhich they access content and obtain media guidance. For example, someusers may have home networks that are accessed by in-home and mobiledevices. Users may control in-home devices via a media guidanceapplication implemented on a remote device. For example, users mayaccess an online media guidance application on a website via a personalcomputer at their office, or a mobile device such as a PDA orweb-enabled mobile telephone. The user may set various settings (e.g.,recordings, reminders, or other settings) on the online guidanceapplication to control the user's in-home equipment. The online guidemay control the user's equipment directly, or by communicating with amedia guidance application on the user's in-home equipment. Varioussystems and methods for user equipment devices communicating, where theuser equipment devices are in locations remote from each other, isdiscussed in, for example, Ellis et al., U.S. Pat. No. 8,046,801, issuedOct. 25, 2011, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in itsentirety.

In a third approach, users of user equipment devices inside and outsidea home can use their media guidance application to communicate directlywith content source 816 to access content. Specifically, within a home,users of user television equipment 802 and user computer equipment 804may access the media guidance application to navigate among and locatedesirable content. Users may also access the media guidance applicationoutside of the home using wireless user communications devices 806 tonavigate among and locate desirable content.

In a fourth approach, user equipment devices may operate in a cloudcomputing environment to access cloud services. In a cloud computingenvironment, various types of computing services for content sharing,storage or distribution (e.g., video sharing sites or social networkingsites) are provided by a collection of network-accessible computing andstorage resources, referred to as “the cloud.” For example, the cloudcan include a collection of server computing devices, which may belocated centrally or at distributed locations, that provide cloud-basedservices to various types of users and devices connected via a networksuch as the Internet via communications network 814. These cloudresources may include one or more content sources 816 and one or moremedia guidance data sources 818. In addition or in the alternative, theremote computing sites may include other user equipment devices, such asuser television equipment 802, user computer equipment 804, and wirelessuser communications device 806. For example, the other user equipmentdevices may provide access to a stored copy of a video or a streamedvideo. In such embodiments, user equipment devices may operate in apeer-to-peer manner without communicating with a central server.

The cloud provides access to services, such as content storage, contentsharing, or social networking services, among other examples, as well asaccess to any content described above, for user equipment devices.Services can be provided in the cloud through cloud computing serviceproviders, or through other providers of online services. For example,the cloud-based services can include a content storage service, acontent sharing site, a social networking site, or other services viawhich user-sourced content is distributed for viewing by others onconnected devices. These cloud-based services may allow a user equipmentdevice to store content to the cloud and to receive content from thecloud rather than storing content locally and accessing locally-storedcontent.

A user may use various content capture devices, such as camcorders,digital cameras with video mode, audio recorders, mobile phones, andhandheld computing devices, to record content. The user can uploadcontent to a content storage service on the cloud either directly, forexample, from user computer equipment 804 or wireless usercommunications device 806 having content capture feature. Alternatively,the user can first transfer the content to a user equipment device, suchas user computer equipment 804. The user equipment device storing thecontent uploads the content to the cloud using a data transmissionservice on communications network 814. In some embodiments, the userequipment device itself is a cloud resource, and other user equipmentdevices can access the content directly from the user equipment deviceon which the user stored the content.

Cloud resources may be accessed by a user equipment device using, forexample, a web browser, a media guidance application, a desktopapplication, a mobile application, and/or any combination of accessapplications of the same. The user equipment device may be a cloudclient that relies on cloud computing for application delivery, or theuser equipment device may have some functionality without access tocloud resources. For example, some applications running on the userequipment device may be cloud applications, i.e., applications deliveredas a service over the Internet, while other applications may be storedand run on the user equipment device. In some embodiments, a user devicemay receive content from multiple cloud resources simultaneously. Forexample, a user device can stream audio from one cloud resource whiledownloading content from a second cloud resource. Or a user device candownload content from multiple cloud resources for more efficientdownloading. In some embodiments, user equipment devices can use cloudresources for processing operations such as the processing operationsperformed by processing circuitry described in relation to FIG. 7.

FIG. 9 is a flowchart of illustrative steps for recognizing a pluralityof natural language queries as having a similar intent and providingsearch results matching the intent in accordance with some embodimentsof this disclosure. Process 900 begins at step 902 where the mediaguidance application implemented on user equipment 100, 400, 802, 804,and/or 806 executed by control circuitry 704 receives an input query viaa user input device (e.g., user input interface 710) where the inputquery includes at least two words. For example, the media guidanceapplication may receive sound input via user input interface 710 from amicrophone connected to user input interface 710. The media guidanceapplication may perform a speech-to-text transform on the sound input bya user via input interface 710.

At step 904, the media guidance application computes a firstrepresentation vector corresponding to a first word of the input queryand a second representation vector corresponding to a second word of theinput query, where respective values of the first and the secondrepresentation vectors correspond to degrees to which the first word andthe second word match features of a set of word features respectively.For example, the media guidance application may analyze a corpus of textand may identify distributional properties of co-occurring words. Forexample, the media guidance application may determine that for a corpuscorresponding to a first user with a dog named “Gladiator,” the word“Gladiator” will co-occur with other words related to dogs because theuser may frequently discuss the dog “Gladiator” but may not discussgladiators of the Roman Empire. However, for a user that is a historybuff, the media guidance application may retrieve a corpus associatedwith the user where the word “gladiator” may co-occur with words relatedto Rome and the Roman Empire, because the second user may frequentlydiscusses gladiators in relation to the Roman Empire but not in relationto a dog name. The media guidance application may identify an embeddingfor words in a multi-dimensional space where words having similarfactors will be located closely in the multi-dimensional space.

At step 906, the media guidance application retrieves, from a database,a search query template relating to a search intent where the searchquery template includes at least two words and is associated with athird representation vector and a fourth representation vector havingrespective values corresponding to degrees to which the third word ofthe search query template and a fourth word of the search query templatematch features of the second of the word features respectively. Forexample, the media guidance application may retrieve a search querytemplate associated with a plurality of words, each word having arespective representation vector. The media guidance application maycompare representation vectors corresponding to a search query (e.g.,the first and the second representation vector) with representationvectors corresponding to words associated with the template (e.g., thethird and the fourth representation vector, which correspond to words ofthe search query template).

At step 908, the media guidance application computes a first distancebetween the first representation vector and the third representationvector. For example, the media guidance application may compare thefirst representation vector with the third representation vector bycomparing a similarity between values within each vector (e.g., comparevalues on an x dimension in the first vector to values on the xdimension in the second vector) to determine an overall similaritybetween the two vectors.

At step 910, the media guidance application determines whether the firstdistance is less than a first threshold distance. For example, the mediaguidance application may retrieve a threshold distance from memory, suchas storage 708 or from a remote database, such as media guidance datasource via communications network 822. For example, the media guidanceapplication may rank all templates based on how closely words of thesearch query match words associated with the template. The mediaguidance application may set the threshold based on a distance betweenthe representation vector for a first word of the query and third wordof the template having the highest ranking. When the media guidanceapplication determines that the distance is less than the threshold, themedia guidance application proceeds to step 912. Otherwise the mediaguidance application may retrieve another template from the database(e.g., a database located at storage 708, or at media guidance datasource 818 via communications network 814) and may return to step 906.

At step 912, the media guidance application computes a second distancebetween the second representation vector and the fourth representationvector. For example, the media guidance application may compute adistance between a representation vector of a second word of a searchquery and a representation vector of a second word associated with atemplate by computing an angle between the two vectors using a cosinedifference as described above.

At step 914, the media guidance application determines whether thesecond distance is less than a second threshold distance. For example,the media guidance application may compute the second thresholddifference in a similar manner to the first threshold distance, or mayretrieve a predefined threshold value from memory, such as storage 708or from media guidance data source 818 via communications network 814.If the media guidance application determines that the distance is lessthan the threshold value, the media guidance application proceeds tostep 916. Otherwise, the media guidance application proceeds to step 906and retrieves another template from a database (e.g., because a currenttemplate did not match within a threshold amount).

At step 916, the media guidance application selects the search querytemplate. For example, the media guidance application may retrieve fromthe database (e.g., database as storage 708 or media guidance datasource 818 via communications network 814) fields associated with adatabase entry corresponding to the template. For example, the mediaguidance application may retrieve entry 316 from database 300 located atmedia guidance data source 818 via communications network 814. The mediaguidance application may access a search query template field (e.g.,search query template 306) and may generate a query based on thetemplate. For example, the media guidance application may identify aword in the template matching a word in the query and may replace a wordfrom the template with a word from the query. For example, the mediaguidance application may identify the word “Entourage” to replace theword “media” in search query template 306 when the user is searching forthe television show “Entourage.”

At step 918, the media guidance application retrieves search resultsbased on the selected search query template. For example, the mediaguidance application may generate a query by replacing a word in thetemplate with a word of the search query, as described above, and maytransmit the query via a network connection to a database correspondingto the template. For example, the media guidance application maytransmit the query to database 304 to identify a location for media. Insome embodiments, the media guidance application may access database 304locally (e.g., via processing circuitry 706 in storage 708) or remotely(e.g., via communication network 814 in media guidance data source 818).

At step 920, the media guidance application generates for display theretrieved search results. For example, the media guidance applicationmay generate for display search results 404 and 406 retrieved fromdatabase 304. In some embodiments, the media guidance application maysynthesize sound using a text-to-speech algorithm and may generate audiooutput corresponding to the search results (e.g., search results 404 andsearch results 406). For example, the media guidance application maygenerate an audio wave for output on speakers 714 comprising synthesizedwords corresponding to search results 404, such as an audio wavecomprising the terms “Entourage Season 1 available on HBO GO—On Demand”In some embodiments, when another template also matches the search queryclosely (e.g., a first template ranked higher by the media guidanceapplication than a second template when the distances are within athreshold value), the media guidance application may prompt the user asto whether the user wants to view additional search results based on thedifferent template. For example, the media guidance application maygenerate for display option 410 on user equipment 400 or may prompt theuser using an audio synthesized using a text-to-speech algorithm asdescribed above. In some embodiments, the media guidance application maywait for user input requesting further search results and may generatefor display further search results in response to receiving selection ofoption 410 (e.g., via an input on a touchscreen via user input interface710), or in response to received audio received via a microphone of userinput interface 710.

FIG. 10 is a flowchart of illustrative steps for selecting a searchquery template in accordance with some embodiments of this disclosure.Process 1000 begins at step 1002 where the media guidance applicationimplemented on user equipment 100, 400, 802, 804, and/or 806 executed bycontrol circuitry 704 receives an input query via a user input device(e.g., user input interface 710) that includes at least two words. Forexample, the media guidance application may receive sound input via userinput interface 710 from a microphone connected to user input interface710. The media guidance application may perform a speech-to-texttransform on the sound input by a user via input interface 710 togenerate a string of words associated with the user input.

At step 1004, the media guidance application determines a category foreach word in the input query. For example, the media guidanceapplication may analyze an association between each word in the queryusing a part-of-speech detection algorithm. For example, the mediaguidance application may determine a category for each word in the inputquery based on a part of speech for each word in relation to the otherwords in the sentence. For example, for the query “Play Entourage” themedia guidance application may determine that the word “Entourage” is anoun and a subject of the query and may accordingly associate“Entourage” with a subject category. In another example, the mediaguidance application may determine that “Find” is an action verb and, inresponse to determining that “Find” is an action verb, may associate“Find” with an action verb category. In some embodiments, the mediaguidance application may compare each word in the query to a list ofstop words stored in memory, such as in storage 708 or in media guidancedata source 818 via communications network 814. If the media guidanceapplication determines that a word matches a word from the list of stopwords, the media guidance application may associate the word in thequery with a stop word category.

At step 1006, the media guidance application determines whether anywords correspond to a stop word category. For example, as describedabove, the media guidance application may compare words of the query towords in a list of stop words. If a word in the query matches a word inthe list of stop words, the media guidance application may determinethat the word corresponds to a stop word category. For example, themedia guidance application may receive a query “When are the Yankeesplaying?” The media guidance application may determine that the words“are” and “the” are stop words based on comparing the words to a list ofstop words or by using a part-of-speech tagging algorithm as describedabove. If the media guidance application determines that a wordcorresponds to the stop words category, the media guidance applicationproceeds to step 1008. Otherwise, the media guidance applicationproceeds to step 1010.

At step 1008, the media guidance application modifies the input query toremove words from the input query matching the stop word category.Following from the previous example, when the media guidance applicationreceives the query “When are the Yankees playing?” the media guidanceapplication may determine that the words “are” and “the” are stop words.The media guidance application may create a modified query excluding thestop words by removing the stop words from the user's original query andkeeping words in the user's original query that do not correspond to astop words category. For example the media guidance application maymodify the input query “When are the Yankees playing?” to be “WhenYankees playing?” so that the system does not waste resources processingterms in the query that do not assist in matching the input query to atemplate.

At step 1010, the media guidance application selects a word from themodified input query. For example, the media guidance application mayincrementally select each word of the modified query (e.g., select thefirst word in a sequence of words in the modified query followed by thesecond word in the sequence of words in the modified query).Alternatively, the media guidance application may select words based ona category associated with each word. For example, the media guidanceapplication may select a word corresponding to an action verb categoryfirst, followed by a word corresponding to a subject category second.However, the media guidance application may use any other selectionmethod based on any other sequence of categories.

At step 1012, the media guidance application computes a firstrepresentation vector for the selected word. For example, the mediaguidance application may apply an algorithm that identifies an embeddingof a word in a vector space based on a trained corpus of word data asdescribed above. The media guidance application may store dataidentifying the vector, such as coordinates in the vector spacecorresponding to the word vector in memory (e.g., storage 708 or mediaguidance data source 818 via communications network 814).

At step 1014, the media guidance application retrieves a search querytemplate from memory. For example, the media guidance application mayselect a search query template randomly or sequentially from memory(e.g., storage 708 or media guidance data source 818 via communicationsnetwork 814). In another example, the media guidance application mayselect the template based on categories associated with words in thesearch query. For example, when the modified search query has wordsassociated with an action verb category, the media guidance applicationmay retrieve a template comprising an action verb.

At step 1016, the media guidance application identifies a word in thesearch query template matching a category of the selected word. Forexample, when the media guidance application receives a query “StreamGame of Thrones,” the media guidance application may retrieve a templatecomprising a search query template “Play Media” (e.g., because thetemplate comprises an action verb, play, and the input query comprisesan action verb “stream”). The media guidance application may select theword “Stream” from the search query and may accordingly select “Play”from the search query template because the words “Play” and “Stream”both correspond to an action verb category.

At step 1018, the media guidance application computes a secondrepresentation vector for the word identified in the search query. Forexample, the media guidance application may compute a representationvector for the word “Play” using any of the methods described above, ormay alternatively or additionally retrieve a pre-computed representationvector from a database associated with the template (e.g., storage 708or media guidance data source 818 via communications network 814).

At step 1020, the media guidance application computes a distance betweenthe first representation vector and the second representation vector.For example, the media guidance application may compute a distancebetween the two vectors using any vector distance computation such as acosine difference between the two vectors.

At step 1022, the media guidance application determines whether thedistance is greater than a threshold maximum distance. For example, themedia guidance application may compute a distance between “Play” and“Stream” and may determine that a vector corresponding to the word“Stream” is close to a vector corresponding to the word “Play” becausethe words have similar meaning and/or frequently co-appear with similarwords based on a text corpus. The media guidance application mayretrieve a threshold for a maximum distance before a value is added to ascore associated with the template. For example, the media guidanceapplication may compute the score to quantify a distance between thetemplate and the search query as a whole (e.g., based on the distancesof a plurality of words in the modified search query to a plurality ofwords in the template). When the media guidance application determinesthat the words are close (e.g., within the threshold) the media guidanceapplication may not penalize the distance by adding any value to thescore. If the media guidance application determines that the distance isgreater than a threshold maximum distance, the media guidanceapplication increments the score corresponding to the template at step1024. Otherwise, the media guidance application proceeds to step 1026.

At step 1024, the media guidance application increments a scorecorresponding to the search query template based on a degree to whichthe first representation vector differs from the second representationvector. For example, the media guidance application may increment thescore based on the distance between the first representation vector andthe second representation vector. In some embodiments, the mediaguidance application may scale the score. For example, the mediaguidance application may multiply the distance between the two vectorsby two (or any other number) and may increment the score by result ofthe multiplication.

At step 1026, the media guidance application determines if a last wordof the modified input query is selected. The media guidance applicationmay determine when it has selected each word from the modified inputquery for comparison to a corresponding word in the template. Forexample, the media guidance application may incrementally select eachword of the input query. The media guidance application may store (e.g.,in storage 708 or in media guidance data source 818 via communicationsnetwork 814) a number of words in the input query and an index valueindicating a position of the word selected by the media guidanceapplication. The media guidance application may determine that the lastword is selected when the index value matches the number of words in theinput query. The media guidance application may use any other method torecognize when each word of the input query has been selected. When themedia guidance application determines that the last word of the modifiedinput query is selected, the media guidance application proceeds to step1028. Otherwise, the media guidance application proceeds to step 1010 toselect another word from the input query.

At step 1028, the media guidance application determines whether thescore corresponding to the search query template is greater than athreshold maximum score (e.g., to determine whether the search templateshould be used for the search). For example, the media guidanceapplication may retrieve a threshold from memory indicating a maximumscore allowable for the search query template to be used for the search.In some embodiments, the media guidance application may compute thethreshold. For example, the media guidance application may compute thethreshold based on a score of other search query templates. For example,the media guidance application may rank each respective search querytemplate with respect to a respective score for the search querytemplate. The media guidance application may compute the thresholdmaximum score as the score of the second highest ranked search querytemplate (e.g., so that only the highest ranked search query template isselected). When the media guidance application determines that the scoreis greater than the threshold maximum score, the media guidanceapplication proceeds to step 1014 to retrieve a search query templatefrom memory (e.g., the highest ranked search query template or anothersearch query template). Otherwise, the media guidance applicationproceeds to step 1030 to generate a query based on the template.

At step 1030, the media guidance application generates a query based onthe template, wherein the identified word in the search query isreplaced with a word from the modified input query. For example, themedia guidance application may retrieve an input query “How can I playHunger Games?” The media guidance application may match the input queryto a search query template associated with the words “Media playbackoptions”. The media guidance application may generate the search querybased on the template by replacing the word “Media” with the word“Hunger Games” from the input query. For example, the media guidanceapplication may replace a word in the template with a word in the querybased on a determination that the word in the query is associated with asame category as a word in the template. For example, the media guidanceapplication may determine that “Hunger Games” is the subject of theinput query and that “Media” is a subject of the template. The mediaguidance application may generate the query “Hunger Games playbackoptions” by replacing the word “Media” with “Hunger Games” in the query.In another example, the media guidance application may receive a querysuch as, “Stream Lord of the Rings”. The media guidance application maymatch the query to a template comprising the word “Get Media How” (e.g.,because this template may be generalizable for all methods to get themedia). The media guidance application may match the word “Stream” tothe words “Get” and “How” in the query, because the word “stream” bothdescribes an action that the user wants to perform (e.g., get the media)and how the user wants the action to be performed (e.g., streamed vs.received on a Blu-ray disk via the mail). The media guidance applicationmay replace the word “how” in the template with the word “stream” (e.g.,because it describes how the user wants to get the media) and mayreplace the word “media” in the template with the word “Lord of theRings” (e.g., the media the user is looking for).

At step 1032, the media guidance application retrieves search resultsusing the generated query. For example, the media guidance applicationmay identify a database associated with the template (e.g., a databasecomprising search results for search queries based on the template). Forexample, when the search query template is associated with mediaplayback, the media guidance application may identify a databaseassociated with media. When the search query template is associated withfantasy sports statistics, the media guidance application may identify adatabase associated with fantasy sports players. The media guidanceapplication may transmit the generated query to the database to retrievesearch results from the database. The media guidance application maygenerate for display or may synthesize via a text-to-speech algorithmany search results retrieved by the media guidance application using anyof the methods described above.

It should be noted that any of processes 900 and/or 1000 or any stepthereof could be performed on, or provided by, any of the devices shownin FIGS. 1, 4, 7-8. For example, process 900 and/or 1000 may be executedby control circuitry 704 (FIG. 7) as instructed by control circuitryimplemented on user equipment on user equipment 802, 804, and/or 806(FIG. 8), 100 (FIG. 1), and/or 400 (FIG. 4) in order to recognize aplurality of natural language queries as having a similar intent andprovides search results matching the intent.

It is contemplated that the steps or descriptions of FIG. 9 and/or FIG.10 may be used with any other embodiment of this disclosure. Inaddition, the steps and descriptions described in relation to FIG. 9and/or FIG. 10 may be done in alternative orders or in parallel tofurther the purposes of this disclosure. For example, each of thesesteps may be performed in any order or in parallel or substantiallysimultaneously to reduce lag or increase the speed of the system ormethod. Furthermore, it should be noted that any of the devices orequipment discussed in relation to FIGS. 1, 4, and 7-8 could be used toperform one or more of the steps in FIG. 9 and/or FIG. 10.

It will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art that methodsinvolved in the present invention may be embodied in a computer programproduct that includes a computer-usable and/or readable medium. Forexample, such a computer-usable medium may consist of a read-only memorydevice, such as a CD-ROM disk or conventional ROM device, or a randomaccess memory, such as a hard drive device or a computer diskette,having a computer-readable program code stored thereon. It should alsobe understood that methods, techniques, and processes involved in thepresent invention may be executed using processing circuitry. Forinstance, matching an input user query to a template may be performed byprocessing circuitry, e.g., by processing circuitry 706 of FIG. 7. Theprocessing circuitry, for instance, may be a general purpose processor,a customized integrated circuit (e.g., an ASIC), or a field-programmablegate array (FPGA) within user equipment 700, media content source 816,or media guidance data source 818. For example, a profile, as describedherein, may be stored in, and retrieved from, storage 708 of FIG. 7, ormedia guidance data source 818 of FIG. 8. Furthermore, processingcircuitry, or a computer program, may update settings associated with auser corpus, stored within storage 708 of FIG. 7 or media guidance datasource 818 of FIG. 8.

The processes discussed above are intended to be illustrative and notlimiting. One skilled in the art would appreciate that the steps of theprocesses discussed herein may be omitted, modified, combined, and/orrearranged, and any additional steps may be performed without departingfrom the scope of the invention. More generally, the above disclosure ismeant to be exemplary and not limiting. Only the claims that follow aremeant to set bounds as to what the present invention includes.Furthermore, it should be noted that the features and limitationsdescribed in any one embodiment may be applied to any other embodimentherein, and flowcharts or examples relating to one embodiment may becombined with any other embodiment in a suitable manner, done indifferent orders, or done in parallel. In addition, the systems andmethods described herein may be performed in real time. It should alsobe noted, the systems and/or methods described above may be applied to,or used in accordance with, other systems and/or methods.

What is claimed is:
 1. A method for performing a search, the methodcomprising: receiving an input query via a user input device, whereinthe input query comprises a plurality of words; identifying, from theplurality of words, a first word and a second word; computing a firstrepresentation vector corresponding to a degree to which the first wordmatches a set of word features, and a second representation vectorcorresponding to a degree to which the second word matches the set ofword features; retrieving, from a database, a search query templaterelating to a search intent; identifying, from a plurality of words ofthe search query template, a third word associated with a thirdrepresentation vector corresponding to a degree to which the third wordmatches the set of word features; identifying, from the plurality ofwords of the search query template, a fourth word associated with afourth representation vector corresponding to a degree to which thefourth word matches the set of word features; determining a similarityof the first representation vector with the third representation vectorand a similarity of the second representation vector with the fourthrepresentation vector; selecting, based on the determined similarities,the search query template; retrieving search results based on theselected search query template; and generating for display the retrievedsearch results.
 2. The method of claim 1, wherein determining asimilarity of the first representation vector with the thirdrepresentation vector and a similarity of the second representationvector with the fourth representation vector comprises: computing afirst distance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector; computing a second distance between the secondrepresentation vector and the fourth representation vector; determiningwhether the first distance is less than a first threshold distance; anddetermining whether the second distance is less than a second thresholddistance.
 3. The method of claim 2, wherein computing the first distancebetween the first representation vector and the third representationvector comprises: comparing a first value in the first representationvector with a corresponding second value in the second representationvector to determine whether the first value and the second value differby less than a threshold value; in response to determining that thevalues differ by less than the threshold value, leaving the distanceunchanged; and in response to determining that the values do not differby less than the threshold value, computing a degree to which the valuesare dissimilar and incrementing the distance based on the degree towhich the values are dissimilar.
 4. The method of claim 2, whereincomputing the first distance between the first representation vector andthe third representation vector is based on an orientation of the firstrepresentation vector with respect to the third representation vector ina vector space, such that the first distance is a measure of an anglebetween the first representation vector and the third representationvector.
 5. The method of claim 1, further comprising including one ofthe first word and the second word from the input query in the query tothe database.
 6. The method of claim 5, further comprising: identifyinga part of speech associated with the first word; and in response todetermining that the first word is a subject of the input query,including the first word in the query to the database.
 7. The method ofclaim 1, further comprising: comparing the first word to a list of stopwords to determine whether the first word matches a stop word of thelist of stop words; and in response to determining that the first wordmatches the stop word: selecting a third word of the input query; andcomputing a fifth representation vector, wherein values of the firstrepresentation vector correspond to degrees to which the third word ofthe input query matches features of the set of word features.
 8. Themethod of claim 2, wherein the first distance is smaller than a thirddistance between the first representation vector and the fourthrepresentation vector when the first word matches a meaning of the thirdword and does not match a meaning of the fourth word.
 9. The method ofclaim 2, wherein the search query template is a first search querytemplate, and further comprising: in response to determining that thefirst distance is greater than the first threshold distance: retrievinga second search query template from the database, wherein the secondsearch query template is associated with a fifth representation vectorand a sixth representation vector having respective values correspondingto degrees to which a first word of the second search query template anda second word of the second search query template match features of theset of word features respectively; and computing a third distancebetween the first representation vector and the fifth representationvector; and in response to determining that the third distance is lessthan the first threshold distance, computing a fourth distance betweenthe second representation vector and the sixth representation vector;and in response to determining that the fourth distance is less than thesecond threshold, selecting the second search query template forretrieving the search results.
 10. The method of claim 1, whereingenerating for display the retrieved search results further comprises:retrieving a layout from the database associated with the search querytemplate; and generating for display the retrieved search results basedon the layout.
 11. A system comprising control circuitry configured tofor performing a search, wherein the control circuitry is configured to:receive an input query via a user input device, wherein the input querycomprises a plurality of words; identify, from the plurality of words, afirst word and a second word; compute a first representation vectorcorresponding to a degree to which the first word matches a set of wordfeatures, and a second representation vector corresponding to a degreeto which the second word matches the set of word features; retrieve,from a database, a search query template relating to a search intent;identify, from a plurality of words of the search query template, athird word associated with a third representation vector correspondingto a degree to which the third word matches the set of word features;identify, from the plurality of words of the search query template, afourth word associated with a fourth representation vector correspondingto a degree to which the fourth word matches the set of word features;determine a similarity of the first representation vector with the thirdrepresentation vector and a similarity of the second representationvector with the fourth representation vector; select, based on thedetermined similarities, the search query template; retrieve searchresults based on the selected search query template; and generate fordisplay the retrieved search results.
 12. The system of claim 11,wherein the control circuitry is further configured, when determining asimilarity of the first representation vector with the thirdrepresentation vector and a similarity of the second representationvector with the fourth representation vector, to: compute a firstdistance between the first representation vector and the thirdrepresentation vector; compute a second distance between the secondrepresentation vector and the fourth representation vector; determinewhether the first distance is less than a first threshold distance; anddetermine whether the second distance is less than a second thresholddistance.
 13. The system of claim 12, wherein the control circuitry isfurther configured, when computing the first distance between the firstrepresentation vector and the third representation vector, to: compare afirst value in the first representation vector with a correspondingsecond value in the second representation vector to determine whetherthe first value and the second value differ by less than a thresholdvalue; in response to determining that the values differ by less thanthe threshold value, leave the distance unchanged; and in response todetermining that the values do not differ by less than the thresholdvalue, compute a degree to which the values are dissimilar and incrementthe distance based on the degree to which the values are dissimilar. 14.The system of claim 12, wherein the control circuitry is furtherconfigured, when computing the first distance between the firstrepresentation vector and the third representation vector, to base thefirst distance on an orientation of the first representation vector withrespect to the third representation vector in a vector space, such thatthe first distance is a measure of an angle between the firstrepresentation vector and the third representation vector.
 15. Thesystem of claim 11, wherein the control circuitry is further configuredto include one of the first word and the second word from the inputquery in the query to the database.
 16. The system of claim 15, whereinthe control circuitry is further configured to: identify a part ofspeech associated with the first word; and in response to determiningthat the first word is a subject of the input query, include the firstword in the query to the database.
 17. The system of claim 11, whereinthe control circuitry is further configured to: compare the first wordto a list of stop words to determine whether the first word matches astop word of the list of stop words; and in response to determining thatthe first word matches the stop word: select a third word of the inputquery; and compute a fifth representation vector, wherein values of thefirst representation vector correspond to degrees to which the thirdword of the input query matches features of the set of word features.18. The system of claim 12, wherein the first distance is smaller than athird distance between the first representation vector and the fourthrepresentation vector when the first word matches a meaning of the thirdword and does not match a meaning of the fourth word.
 19. The system ofclaim 12, wherein the search query template is a first search querytemplate, and wherein the control circuitry is further configured to: inresponse to determining that the first distance is greater than thefirst threshold distance: retrieve a second search query template fromthe database, wherein the second search query template is associatedwith a fifth representation vector and a sixth representation vectorhaving respective values corresponding to degrees to which a first wordof the second search query template and a second word of the secondsearch query template match features of the set of word featuresrespectively; and compute a third distance between the firstrepresentation vector and the fifth representation vector; and inresponse to determining that the third distance is less than the firstthreshold distance, compute a fourth distance between the secondrepresentation vector and the sixth representation vector; and inresponse to determining that the fourth distance is less than the secondthreshold, select the second search query template for retrieving thesearch results.
 20. The system of claim 11, wherein the controlcircuitry is further configured, when generating for display theretrieved search results, to: retrieve a layout from the databaseassociated with the search query template; and generate for display theretrieved search results based on the layout.